


s> 












A^' \.. 



W: 






'^■a^.y'i 









S* .Vr 



^ 

^ 

^.^ 



^ 






^-' 



^ 






,0- 






AS OTHERS SEE US 



A STUDY OF PROGRESS IN THE 
UNITED STATES 



BY 
JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS 

AUTHOR OF "THE SOCIAL UNREST" 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1908 

A!i rights reserved 



LIBRAHY of CONGRESS 
Two Copifs Received 

OCT 26 1908 

C^'D/Mjl.! Lfilry 



Copyright, 1908, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1908. 



NntinnolJ l^uss 

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



DEDICATED 

TO THE 

RIGHT HON. JAMES BRYCE 



CONTENTS 



I, 

II. 


Concerning Our Critics . . . . 


III. 


Who is the American ? . . . . 


IV. 


Our Talent for Bragging. 


V. 


Some Other Peculiarities . . . . 


VI. 


American Sensitiveness . . . . 


VII. 


The Mother Country as Critic 


VIII. 


Change of Tone in Foreign Criticism 


IX. 


Higher Criticism 


X. 


Our French Visitors 


XI. 


Democracy and Manners . . . . 


XII. 


Our Monopoly of Wit . . . . 


XIII. 


Our Greatest Critic 


XIV. 


A Philosopher as Mediator 


XV. 


A Socialist Critic 


XVI. 


Signs of Progress 


XVII. 


Signs of Progress — Continued . 


Bibliography 


Index 





PAGE 
I 

21 

39 
6o 

77 

99 
ii6 
129 
151 
173 
191 
213 
231 
253 
274 

294 
322 

347 
355 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Harriet Martineau (Sketch) .... 14 

Mrs. Trollope 62 

A Scene at a Campmeeting 80 

Captain Basil Hall 96 

Captain Marryat 112 

Sir Charles Lyell 132 

Charles Dickens 148 . 

Alexis de Tocqueville 152. 

Harriet Martineau 194 

James Bryce 232 

H. G. Wells 274 

Max O'Rell (M. Blouet) 296 

First Trip of Fulton's Steamboat to Albany . 318 



AS OTHERS SEE US: A 
STUDY OF PROGRESS 

CHAPTER I 

THE PROBLEM OPENED 

It was an accident, but I shall always think of 
it as a happy one. In 1893, j^ist starting upon a 
long lecture tour through the Middle West, I fell 
upon three volumes of Criticisms on our American 
Life and Institutions, "Travels in North America." 
They were written in 1827-1828 by a distinguished 
naval officer, Captain Basil Hall. They were in 
their time a classic in this literature of foreign 
observation. The mother of our veteran man of 
lettejs, T. W. Higginson, left an account of this 
traveller, who was introduced to her home by the 
historian Jared Sparks. 

Later we hear that "everybody" is reading 
Captain Hall's book, losing their temper and wonder- 
ing how he could accept so much hospitality and 
then go home to write three volumes of "abuse, 
stupidities, and slanders." I cannot imagine an 
American to-day reading those books with one flutter 
of fretful emotion. He was "honest as a Saxon" 



2 AS OTHERS SEE US 

and extremely painstaking. With hardy conscien- 
tiousness, he travelled several thousand miles, really 
seeing most phases of life then observable in the 
United States. 

Quite two generations had passed between the 
publication and my reading of these books. As the 
author's letters of introduction opened all doors to 
him, he saw much of what was best in the home 
life of those days. An inveterate note-taker, he 
made records of his observations upon our institu- 
tions, religion, manners, habits, politics, business, 
and modes of life. Like most of the earlier English 
visitors, he brought with him his own national 
standard of well-doing, and to this test of propriety 
he submitted every unhappy variation in our Ameri- 
can behavior. By so far as it was not English, by 
so far was it an object for correction and disapproval. 
He visited Congress, where he was surprised and 
offended because objectionable orators were not 
forthwith coughed or groaned into silence, as was 
the effective custom in the House of Commons. 

He says : — 

"I was much struck with one peculiarity in these debates, 
— the absence of all cheering, coughing, or other methods 
by which, in England, pubHc bodies take the liberty of com- 
municating to the person who is speaking a full knowledge 
of the impression made upon the audience. In America 
there is nothing to supply the endless variety of tones in which 
the word 'Hear! Hear!' is uttered in the House of Com- 
mons, by which the member who is speaking ascertains, with 
the utmost distinctness and precision, whether the House are 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 3 

pleased or displeased with him, bored or delighted, or whether 
what he says is granted or denied — lessons eminently useful 
in the conduct of public debate." 

In our own day we are not without agitation over 
spelling reform, but where among conservatives 
would one find a match for this doughty objector ? 
The English Dictionary had to him a final sacred- 
ness which makes the slightest deviation an afifront to 
the language. When he discovers a few new words, 
he cannot rest until he sets us right. 

"Surely," he says, "such innovations are to be 
deprecated." 

"I don't know that," replies the American. "If 
a word becomes universally current in America 
where English is spoken, why should it not take its 
station in the language?" 

"Because," answers our critic, ''there are words 
enough in our language already and it only confuses 
matters and hurts the cause of letters to introduce 
such words J^ * 

Another Englishman in our own day, far better 
instructed in linguistic matters than Basil Hall, 
shows us the change in literary tolerance. The 
latter declared his countrymen thought of the Ameri- 
cans as having received from England every good 
they possessed. It was rank impiety to take the 
slightest liberty with this inheritance. 

He writes : — 

"England taught the Americans all they have of speech 
' Vol. I, p. 37. 



4 AS OTHERS SEE US 

or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned 
from England are fooHsh thoughts; what words they have 
not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among 
them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only 
obscene mocking-birds." 

In the judgment of William Archer we nov^ see 
how far we have left behind us this petty provin- 
cialism. 

He writes : — 

"New words are begotten by new conditions of life; and 
as American Ufe is far more fertile of new conditions than 
ours, the tendency towards neologism cannot but be stronger 
in America than in England. America has enormously en- 
riched the language, not only with new words, but (since the 
American mind is, on the whole, quicker and wittier than the 
English) with apt and luminous colloquial metaphors." ^ 

There is scarcely a trait of our moral, intellectual, 
and institutional life that we cannot in the same 
way test by changes in the opinions of these critics 
who sit in judgment upon us. 

Captain Hall came when the aristocratic traditions 
of property and religion were rapidly yielding to 
democratic forms and standards. This filled him 
with alarm. Every American aristocrat, together 
with all the lackey imitators of aristocracy, assured 
him that these democratic substitutes were the 
handwriting on the wall. The sun was about to 
set on the "great experiment." 

This is the kind of alarm-signal which Hall selects 
to prove our on-coming calamities that are of most 

* "America To-day"; William Archer, Scribner's, 1S99, p. 218. 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 5 

interest to us. He was sure, for instance, that 
both our manners and morals are in peril because 
we have no class among us to spend money with 
grace and distinction. He counted this among the 
highest of arts, "more difficult than the art of 
making it," — "the art of spending it like a gentle- 
man." If we but had among us these models, 
free from the stain of making their own living, they 
could so spend income which others had earned as 
to set before the common people worthy and inspir- 
ing ideals. This " art of spending like a gentleman" 
may be taught like other arts. The Captain is 
confident that plain and honest folk in the United 
States would respond, if they could have in familiar 
circulation a goodly number of these models. Then 
they would show the most vulgar how to do it. 
Especially if one disburses unearned moneys, it 
may be done with a courtly abandon that cannot 
fail to impress the most stolid among the masses. 
He feels sure, too, that these artistic largesses would 
strengthen every bond of society as well as refine it. 
It would deepen the sense among the people that 
they were in the presence of superior persons, and 
this could not fail to quicken gratitude and sympathy 
even among the most lowly. 

If there are any misgivings about this, you have 
only to look to the Mother Country, where a " per- 
manent money-spending" gentry willingly serve as 
models with results so conspicuous as to silence all 
doubts. 



6 AS OTHERS SEE US 

That we should have given up flogging in the 
army, struck him likewise as a peril to the Republic, 
From careful inquiries, he finds what he feared — 
that discipline is declining and, what one would not 
have expected, " the soldiers hecoining discontented.''^ 
In spite of their writhings under the lash, they 
really understood its beneficence. It was because 
no profane hand had touched the custom of flogging 
in the navy — thereby introducing discontent among 
the flogged sailors — that the superiority of the navy 
becomes clear to him. 

It was a real perplexity to him that so many of 
the common people behaved as if they were not infe- 
riors. It was a kind of bluff that he had not be- 
fore encountered. 

An observed difference of manner in serving at 
table calls out this comment : — 

"At a place called the Little Falls, where we stopped to 
dine, a pretty young woman, apparently the daughter of the 
master of the house, also served us at dinner. When her 
immediate attendance was not required, she sat down in the 
window with her work, exactly as if she had been one of the 
party. There was nothing, however, in the least degree for- 
ward or impudent in this ; on the contrary, it was done quietly 
and respectfully, though with perfect ease, and without the 
least consciousness of its being contrary to European man- 
ners." 1 

That we should think of discarding primogeniture 
and allow the property to pass equally to all the 
children is another amazing blunder. How can a 
1 Vol. II, p. 3. 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 7 

society survive in "the absence of all classification 
of ranks"? For the absence of ranks "prevents 
people becoming sufBciently well acquainted with 
one another to justify such intimacies." 

The vast landed estates of the Livingstons on 
the Hudson were actually in danger of passing into 
the hands of Tom, Dick, and Harry. Where half a 
dozen landlords once lived, he finds to his dismay 
"as many hundreds may now be counted." ^ The 
fulness of the calamity can only be seen when its 
consequences are considered. It will not leave an 
income on which one may live like a gentleman 
without work. 

In his anxiety for our welfare, he says : — 

"The property of the parent, therefore, is generally divided 
equally amongst the children. This division, as may be sup- 
posed, seldom gives to each sufficient means to enable him to 
live independently of business; and consequently, the same 
course of money-making habits which belonged to the parents 
necessarily descends to the son. Or, supposing there be only 
one who succeeds to the fortune, in what way is he to spend 
it? Where, when, and with whom? How is he to find com- 
panionship? How expect sympathy from the great mass of 
all the people he mixes amongst, whose habits and tastes lie 
in totally different directions?" * 

Captain Hall was here several years before Eng- 
land had done away with those rotten boroughs 
which enabled a few landlords to make all the laws 
of the land. Yet he was thrown into much heat by 
the suggestion that the House of Commons needed 
1 Vol. I, p. 307. 



8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

reforming in this respect. "I do not think," he 
says, "we could possibly make it better." ^ Bir- 
mingham at that time could send no representative 
to Parliament; yet this city, says Mr. Hall, "is in 
practice one of the best represented cities in the 
Empire." 

So, too, our separation of Church and State is like 
throwing away "the fly-wheel in a great engine." 
Yet this intelligent gentleman had been in all parts 
of the world and was an honored guest and friend 
in the family of Sir Walter Scott, as we learn in 
Lockhart's Life. 

The extracts given are not wholly just to him, as 
there is much good-will, innumerable shrewd com- 
ments on our manners and customs; and through- 
out, a certain obdurate purpose to learn the facts. 
In his final comments he even shows surprising 
humility. He discovers that his notes contain the 
most bewildering contradictions which reflect upon 
the finality of his observations. He adds : — 

"For my part, I acknowledge fairly, that after some ex- 
perience in the embarrassing science of travelling, I have often 
been so much out of humor w^ith the people amongst whom 
I was wandering that I have most perversely derived pleasure 
from meeting things to find fault with ; and very often, I am 
ashamed to say, when asking for information, have detected 
that my wish was rather to prove my original and prejudiced 
conceptions right, than to discover that I had previously done 
the people injustice." ^ 

His serenity during the trip was often ruffled by 

' Vol. I, p. 49. 2 Vol. I, p. 167. 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 9 

impudent inclination on the part of many Americans 
to disregard and even, in extreme cases, scoff at his 
good counsels. And thus, with much kindly feeling, 
we part from this guest and general adviser. 

It was rather his strictures upon our minor vices, 
if they are minor: our much spitting, our unlovely 
voices, familiarities, curiosities, incessant national 
bragging, and undue sensitiveness to criticism that 
made me grateful to the author during those three 
months' journeying fifteen years ago. Reading 
his pages by bits in trains and in hotels, I was 
quickened to ask, what of these criticisms are still 
true about us? How far are we still the people 
described in those volumes? I had written four 
closely summarized pages of individual and insti- 
tutional characteristics which Captain Hall thought 
he saw in us. With this list in hand, it was easier 
to note at least some great changes both in institu- 
tions and in our conduct as citizens and neighbors. 
With these observations for a background, one could 
take measurements. For example, like several 
other visitors in those days, Hall was struck re- 
peatedly by the frigid isolation of men and women 
at social gatherings. 

"I seldom observed anything in America but the most 
respectful and icy propriety upon all occasions when young 
people of different sexes were brought together. Positively 
I never once, during the whole period I was in that country, 
saw anything approaching, within many degrees, to what 
we should call a flirtation." 



lO AS OTHERS SEE US 

Again, 

"The result of all my observations and inquiries is, that 
the women do not enjoy that station in society which has 
been allotted to them elsewhere; and consequently much of 
that important and habitual influence which, from the pe- 
culiarity of their nature, they alone can exercise over society 
in more fortunately arranged communities, seems to be lost." 

All things are working, he thinks, to give the two 
sexes in the United States "such different classes of 
occupations, that they seldom act together; and this 
naturally prevents the growth of that intimate com- 
panionship, which nothing can establish but the 
habitual interchange of opinions and sentiments 
upon topics of common employment." ^ 

Mrs. TroUope says she was at several balls "where 
everything was on the most liberal scale of expense, 
when the gentlemen sat down to supper in one room, 
while the ladies took theirs, standing, in another." 

It was on this journey, that I first heard two univer- 
sity teachers with much experience in instructing 
men and women together, expressing alarm at coedu- 
cation. "It brings them," said one, "far too closely 
together, socially and educationally. The young 
fellow sees the girl at such close range and so con- 
stantly, that she loses the mystery and charm that 
are her best asset." I do not recall any argument 
based on the supposed lowering of educational 
standard because of coeducation. It was rather 

1 "Travels in the United States," Vol. II, pp. 150, 153. See 
also p. 157. 



THE PROBLEM OPENED H 

that academic and social intercourse had become too 
fraternal and intimate.^ 

Here, then, is a wide span between the icy disen- 
gagement of the sexes in 1827 and the present free- 
dom of fellowship. If travellers in those days are 
to be believed, this condition has further illustration 
in the grotesque prudery of the women. To utter 
aloud in their presence the word shirt was an 
open insult. Mrs. TroUope does not state this more 
strongly than other writers when she says : — 

"A young German gentleman of perfectly good manners, 
once came to me greatly chagrined at having offended one of 
the principal families in the neighborhood, by having pro- 
nounced the vi^ord corset before the ladies of it. 

"I once mentioned to a young lady that I thought a picnic 
party would be very agreeable, and that I would propose it 
to some of our friends. She agreed that it would be delight- 
ful, but she added, 'I fear you will not succeed; we are not 
used to such sort of things here, and I know it is considered 
very indelicate for ladies and gentlemen to sit down together 
on the grass.'" ^ 

When Powers's "Chanting Cherubs" were ex- 
hibited in Boston, it was necessary to drape their 
loins with linen, and a like treatment was accorded 

' Von Polenz, in a recent book of admirable temper, speaks of 
the freedom of intercourse in its beautiful expression between the 
sexes. "Das Land der Zukunft," p. 231. 

In 1904 a Frenchman writes, "I have nowhere seen a freer, 
happier, or more wholesome mingling of the sexes than in the 
United States." 

^ Vol. I, p. 192. 



12 AS OTHERS SEE US 

to an orang-outang which visited the city about the 
same time/ 

It is a far journey from all this, to days when thou- 
sands of well-bred girls hasten, without parental resist- 
ance, to listen to plays of Bernard Shaw and to others 
freer still. Whether the change is approved or de- 
plored, it is very great, and our critics furnish the 
personal perspective through which the change may 
be seen. 

Returning home, I at once reread Dickens's 
"American Notes" and the parts of "Martin 
Chuzzlewit" which refer to the United States. I 
had forgotten the lively resentment roused by their 
first reading. What had happened that thirty years 
later the smart of his grossest caricatures had utterly 
disappeared? It was partly because one recog- 
nized so much truth in the picture. There were 
characteristics in our public and private life which 
richly deserved the kind of punishment which this 
great humorist administered. It is now plain his- 
tory that we had many a promoter's scheme which 
the bunco-game of land sales in "Martin Chuzzle- 
wit" scarcely exaggerates. Philadelphians wanted 
to put Dickens in a cell for telling such lies about 
their model prison. We now know that he told the 
truth; that he did a public service in calling atten- 
tion to the essential barbarity of that boasted prison 
method. When he wrote "those benevolent gentle- 

* McMaster's "History of the People of the United States," 
Vol. VI, p. 96. 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 1 3 

men who carry it into execution, do not know what 
they are doing," he was both seer and prophet. 
We all learned, too, that Dickens, like Matthew 
Arnold, was impartial. He was as pitiless in his 
caricature of evils in England as of those in the 
United States. Twenty-five years later (1868), he 
came again to this country, noting the "gigantic 
changes" — changes in the graces and amenities 
of life, changes in the Press, etc., to which he adds, 
"I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, 
delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration." 
The sting has gone from all his gibes, because we 
are far enough away to measure both the critic and 
the objects criticised. 

For my journey on the following year, I took 
Harriet Martineau's "Society in America," Hamil- 
ton's "Men and Manners in America," Mrs. Trol- 
lope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans." 
The latter book I had long before read, but, as with 
Dickens, the new reading was merely good fun. 
To have as travelling companion a commentator 
as penetrating as Harriet Martineau, had the quick 
reward of added interest in one's fellow-passengers 
on the train and in the happenings at hotels and 
stations. Probably no one, except Mr. Bryce, 
read more carefully in preparation for the trip than 
this distinguished woman. There is no phase of 
our life that her two volumes leave untouched. If 
we add to these, the portions of her Autobiography 
devoted to us, we have a cyclopaedia of critical 



14 AS OTHERS SEE US 

observation on our institutions, religion, morals, 
politics, manners, voices, education, industrial and 
economic life, which is invaluable, if our purpose is 
to measure the ups and downs, the tendencies, 
changes, and progress in this country. 

These authors finished, the interest excited proved 
so keen that for several years I rarely took a journey 
without putting into my bag one or more of these 
reviewers of American life and conduct. This has 
resulted in a collection of some seventy-five volumes, 
the titles of which are given at the end of these 
chapters. 

It soon appeared that writers earlier than the 
Revolution (1776) dealt with a world so removed 
from our own, that the kind of comparison here 
aimed at was too difficult. Earlier than Brissot and 
Crevecceur, I therefore do not go. 

The list is extremely incomplete, even incoherent, 
and every reader will recall books of which no men- 
tion is made, as well as some books that are far 
better than many here used. 

The list does, nevertheless, include most of those 
whose opinions we care to consider. To search out 
all the critics was no part of my purpose, neither to 
report all the opinions of those selected. The books 
are used solely to throw, if possible, a little light on 
social movement (whether forward or backward) 
in this country. For example, an Englishman as 
intelligent as Janson, living here thirteen years, 
comes to this conclusion about our government : — 




aS^d- c-^' 



A malicious contemporary sketch of Harriet Martineau, emphasizing the 
fact that she was a " Maiden Lady." From a rare cut presented 
to the author by a daughter of the poet Longfellow. 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 1 5 

"With all the lights of experience blazing before our eyes, 
it is impossible not to discern the futility of this form of gov- 
ernment. It was weak and wicked in Athens. It was bad in 
Sparta, and worse in Rome. It has been tried in France, and 
has terminated in despotism. It was tried in England, and 
rejected with the utmost loathing and abhorrence. It is on trial 
here, and the issue will be civil war, desolation, and anarchy." 

However haltingly it has gone with us, this lower- 
ing judgment is a landmark from which we derive 
encouragement. 

If a statesman of the rank of Richard Cobden 
finds that no power on earth can prevent the swift 
triumph of free trade in this country ; if he can tabu- 
late all the reasons why liberty in trade will become 
as sacred to Americans as liberty in other spheres, 
that, too, is a landmark stimulating many reflections. 
Miss Martineau, as an economist, found sure evi- 
dence that labor and capital must in the nature of 
things live happily together under our institutions. 
She found entire absence of paupers and a state of 
bliss in the Lowell cotton mills. 

Another has proof that "opportunity" together 
with "solitary confinement in our magnificent pris- 
ons" will cause the total disappearance of criminal 
classes and thus take off a great burden of expenditure. 

The greatest of French critics tells us why our 
democracy will prevent the buying of votes. With 
what reflections would De Tocqueville now investi- 
gate Pennsylvania and Rhode Island or, indeed, 
most of our States? 



1 6 AS OTHERS SEE US 

These are samples of opinion two generations ago. 
'Like landmarks, they fix and define the attention. 
A little later, we were assured that the days of the 
Republic were numbered because women were de- 
manding "rights" which would turn into a license, 
"destructive of the very elements of social safety." 

From such driven stakes, we may test movement 
and direction through the century. With specific 
exceptions, it is a story extremely chilling to the 
pessimist. It is, upon the whole, a story which gives 
the lie to a thousand dire prophecies that the people 
cannot learn self-government. It is above all a 
story that puts new vitality and interest into our 
home problems. It was an unexpected reward in 
reading these books to find a new charm in American 
life. Much that had seemed to me commonplace, 
dull, or trivial, was clothed with surprising interest. 
Why should this not be so? 

We do not think it half intelligent to travel in 
Italy without our Burckhardt, Symonds, Taine, or 
other literature as interpreter. How many of us 
do this for our own country ? There is no distinctive 
section of the United States that has not an illumi- 
nating literature. To pass along the trail of Andy 
Adams's "Log of a Cowboy" with that book in 
hand is to get three or four times as much pleasure 
out of the trip. The same service is done for other 
parts of the country by Thoreau, Cable, Fox, 
Craddock, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Deland, and a score 
of others. 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 1 7 

I saw once three college girls on the boat plying 
between Richmond and Old Point Comfort. One 
was reading a novel by Daudet, the second was 
absorbed in the last story by Mrs. Humphry Ward, 
and the third by something quite as unrelated to the 
opportunities of the day. They were on their first 
trip upon this most interesting river in America. 
Not a sweeping curve of it that is not rich with 
memorable events. John Fiske's "Virginia and 
Her Neighbors" or one of James Rhodes' sterling 
volumes gives new and fascinating meaning to every 
mile of that day's journey. Think of a college girl 
passing Jamestown for the first time, dazed by a 
French novel ! If romance were a necessity, one 
would think that the local color in stories, like those 
of Ellen Glasgow or Miss Johnson or Thomas Nelson 
Page, might meet the need. 

In a still larger way, the best of these foreign critics 
arouse curiosity about problems and events which we 
so largely take for granted as to feel at most a sleepy 
interest in them. Even the superficial observations 
of the stranger, quick to notice all dissimilarity, 
arouse our home-consciousness in many ways. At 
the St. Louis Exposition, I saw a most intelligent 
and experienced American teacher thrown into a 
state of lively excitement by so simple a question as 
this. A German teacher asked: "In your Edu- 
cational Exhibits, why do you display the work of 
the pupils so much, and the efficiency of the teachers 
so little ? It looks as if you were trying to show them 



1 8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

off." "Well," he answered, "I never in my life 
thought of it before, but I think that is precisely 
what we do. Yes, we try to show them off too 
much." It was the contention of the German that 
far more should be made of the training and com- 
petence of the instructor; that this should be at the 
front rather than a display of the child. "We do 
not think one quite fit to teach in our German schools 
unless he is so solidly prepared and so far beyond 
his pupils as to be perfectly secure. If he has to 
show off the class, or to struggle with his subject 
in order to keep just ahead of those he teaches, the 
best result cannot possibly be reached." 

With the merits of this observation, I am less con- 
cerned than with the effect upon the American 
teacher. He said, "The conversation with that 
German has paid me for coming to St. Louis, if I 
don't learn another thing." 

About every phase of our life and institutions, this 
is what the outside observer may do for us. 

An English writer does not overstate it when he 
says: "I read Bryce before I left home, and I read 
him again while here. The trip would have been 
worth the two hundred pounds it cost me if I had 
read nothing else. Bryce has added at least four- 
fold, both to the pleasure and profit." 

It is almost an equal service that these books may 
render to us at home. 

Before passing to the general account of these 
critics in the following chapter, one observation 



THE PROBLEM OPENED 1 9 

should be made. To criticise or to make merry 
over the peculiarities of foreign peoples has been 
from time immemorial one of the never failing 
sources of national gaiety. Every variety of per- 
sonal and race difference becomes a natural target 
for ridicule or censure. An Englishman goes to 
live in a small French town in 1803. He writes 
home that "these barbarians make fun of me 
everywhere just because I am properly dressed and 
speak the language of a human being. They 
chatter like apes and dress like Punch and Judy." 
In spite of so much admiration, Voltaire sees the 
English, Shakespeare included, as essentially bar- 
barians; while to the average Englishman of that 
time, the French were "half insane and half mon- 
key." ^ This provincialism is not confined to the 
stay-at-homes or to the ignorant. It disturbs, as we 
shall see, the judgment of very wise men. 

As one of our haunting perplexities will be in 
avoiding local standards of comparison, as our 
institutions and national behavior are brought to the 
bar, I shall make frequent reference to four critics 
who have nothing to do with the United States : 
Karl Hillebrand's "France and the French," Hamer- 
ton's "French and English," De Amicis' "Holland," 

' "Frenchmen," Coleridge said, "are like grains of gunpowder: 
each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together 
and they are terrible indeed!" Johnson referred to Americans 
as "a race of convicts who ought to be thankful for anything we 
allow them short of hanging." He was "willing to love all man- 
kind, except an American.'" 



20 AS OTHERS SEE US 

and Taine's "Notes on England." These are 
critics of so high a class ; each with so much knowl- 
edge and so much cosmopolitan sympathy, that we 
may by their help correct the narrowing tendency to 
praise or condemn because our own village standards 
are set at naught. 



CHAPTER II 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 



It would be better if four-fifths of the earlier 
critical literature here dealt with could be expurgated. 
We should thus be relieved from reading for the 
fortieth time that we lack many things: courtly 
behavior, a great literature, the ennobling ministries 
of the fine arts, imposing ruins, and cathedrals. 
We should be relieved of interminable commentary 
on our bad roads, hotels, boarding-houses, rocking- 
chairs, ice-water, hot bread, overheated rooms, 
mountainous helps to ice-cream, and even Niagara. 
A reasonable disclosure of these deficiencies en- 
lightens and exhilarates, but there is a pitch of 
reiteration beyond which hot bread and Niagara 
alike become a surfeit. It was thus a pleasant 
shock when H. G. Wells refused to admire Niagara. 
He is the first to break the long monotony of approval. 
The Falls may be said to be the only American 
phenomenon in the praise of which all previous 
critics agree. They pretty nearly agree about our 
bragging and about the Capitol at Washington, but 
with nothing like the unanimity with which they 
approach Niagara. To all observers it is an instant 



22 AS OTHERS SEE US 

challenge to a literary flight. It seems as profane 
to leave it undescribed as to pass it by altogether. 
In recent years three objects have diverted attention 
somewhat from the above list: the sky-scraper, the 
observation-car, and the Statue of Liberty in New 
York Harbor. To the visitor landing and departing^ 
this proud lady with her luminous torch "enlighten- 
ing the world" is at once a symbol and an inspiration. 
If he thinks well of us, the draped figure becomes 
alive and radiant with hope. If he thinks ill of us, 
the poor lady serves only for taunts and satire. So 
conspicuous is she at the point of landing that ice- 
water and rocking-chairs are in peril of being over- 
looked by future travellers. 

At whatever risk, I shall make slight use of all 
these overworked objects. We shall not as a nation 
stand or fall on our hot bread or even on our por- 
tentous helps to ice-cream or the majestic demeanor 
of our hotel clerks. That in our thinly populated 
days we should have had bad roads ; that we should 
be late in developing literature and the arts, that 
the very immensity of our natural resources should 
have hitherto chiefly absorbed our energies, putting 
inventions, trade, and the dollar-mark much to the 
front, are facts so easily accounted for that one 
wonders why they should have called out so much 
reproachful and condescending speculation. 

As it is our purpose to get the best out of those 
who come to study us, it is first necessary to ask who 
our critic is, and, as far as possible, what motive 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 23 

brought him. We have an English lecturer writing 
openly, "I really went out there [to the United 
States] for the express purpose of showing what a 
mess they are making of it." A very great person, 
socially, lived some months in Hoboken, New Jersey 
because he was a fugitive from English justice. He 
disliked us extremely and even had his jBing at 
Hoboken as a place of residence. A tenderly 
nurtured gentleman with royal blood in him can be 
forgiven much under those circumstances. That 
Prince Talleyrand, after living his life among the 
most stirring events and brilliant company in 
Europe, should find us tiresome can be understood 
without much strain on the imagination. It is also 
satisfying that we have received our most abusive 
reproofs from men like Renan, Carlyle, and Ruskin, 
who never came to us. The poet-craftsman William 
Morris was also at one with them, until he was 
shown photographs of Richardson's architecture. 
This brought from him the exclamation, "Talent 
like that may save the States after all." To "Ameri- 
canize" anything was, to Renan, the measure of its 
vulgarization.^ All these safe-distance critics were 
urged to visit this country, but refused for the same 
reason that a famous American refused to go to 
Chicago, because — it was Chicago. 

Many of those who came in the first half of the 

* The French lecturer, M. Blouet (Max O'Rell), referring to 
Renan's fear that France would become "Americanized," replied, 
"May nothing worse happen to her!" 



24 AS OTHERS SEE US 

century are at pains to tell us about the motives that 
brought them. In the main it was the desire to 
study men and institutions developing under sup- 
posedly democratic government. 

Cut loose from England, what would happen with 
power at last in the hands of the people ! Nowhere 
was curiosity about all this so keen as in France. 
Prizes were there proposed for essays on this subject. 
It was seen that Europe could not escape the influ- 
ence of every democratic success in America. All 
those who believed that the people should be saved 
by their social superiors ; that political and economic 
blessings should be confined to the squire and his 
relations, and common folk kept in their proper 
stations, looked upon our independence as a threat 
to the world's well-being. 

The industrious Abbe Raynal had the good of 
the universe much at heart. He concluded, in a 
work ponderous with misinformation, that the dis- 
covery of America was a stark calamity. Another, 
M. Genty,* showed in much detail why the happiness 
of the race is put in jeopardy by our discoverer. 
According to John Fiske, these timorous patricians 
agreed in only one thing. One good and one only 
must be accorded to the enterprise of Columbus — 
quinine. That had resulted from the discovery, and 
European fevers were checked. But the brave 
Genty doubted if political and social fevers would 
get any cooling from our shores. Even if commerce 

' " L'influence de la Decouverte de rAmerique," 1789. 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 25 

should swell, what result could follow^ but a plague 
of new wants to satisfy? 

We get encouragement from only one of these 
prize writers. He had at least been to America, 
where he had served as general under Rochambeau. 
He had a noble enthusiasm for Franklin and Wash- 
ington. This critic, the Marquis of Chastellux, 
was the author of that pen picture of Washington 
that has become so familiar but always pleasant to 
read again. 

"His stature is noble and lofty, he is well made, and exactly 
proportioned; his physiognomy mild and agreeable, but such 
as to render it impossible to speak particularly of any of his 
features, so that in quitting him, you have only the recollection 
of a fine face. He has neither a grave nor a familiar air, his 
broviT is sometimes marked with thought, but never with in- 
quietude; in inspiring respect, he inspires confidence, and his 
smile is always the smile of benevolence." 

He was also the author of other passages which 
prove him to have been a most philosophic observer. 
He thinks, as De Tocqueville did later, that we were 
fitted at least for stimulating vast material prosperity 
which might prove big with danger. This leads to 
the following reflection upon the inevitable coming 
of inequalities in a democracy due to great wealth 
among the favored few : — 

"Now, wherever this inequality exists, the real force will 
invariably be on the side of property, so that if the influence 
in government be not proportioned to that property, there 
will always be a contrariety, a combat between the form of 



26 AS OTHERS SEE US 

government and its natural tendency; the right will be on 
one side, and the power on the other; the balance then can 
only exist between the two equally dangerous extremes of 
aristocracy and anarchy. Besides, the ideal worth of men 
must ever be comparative; an individual without property 
is a discontented citizen, when the State is poor; place a rich 
man near him, he dwindles into a clown. What will result 
then, one day, from vesting the right of election in this class 
of citizens ? The source of civil broils, or corruption, perhaps 
both at the same time." 

He foresaw this danger from our politicians : ^ — 

"The leaders rather seek to please than serve them [the 
people]; obliged to gain their confidence before they merit it, 
they are more inclined to flatter than instruct them, and fear- 
ing to lose the favor they have acquired, they finish by becom- 
ing the slaves of the multitude whom they pretended to 
govern." 

As with the letters of Frederika Bremer and the 
French Ambassador de Bacourt, Chastellux is all 
the more valuable because, in making his notes, he 
had no thought of publishing them. 

But the importance of the motive will best be seen 
through examples. Many of the first comers are 
at no pains to conceal the purpose of their visit, or 
what determined them to write a book about us. 

The day of the reporter had not come, and there 
was little fear of the press. 

A good illustration of this is C. W. Janson's 
"Stranger in America." He comes with a small 

* "Travels in North America in 1 780-1 782," Chastellu.x, pp. 73, 
131. 154. 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 27 

fortune in search of investment.^ Before he lands, 
he is nicknamed "the Grumbler." He says, "I 
am ready to confess that I put myself foremost in 
our struggle to redress grievances." In that charac- 
ter he lived more than ten years in the United States. 
His investments failed, and thus returning full of 
expansive aversion, he published his book in London 
in 1807. He is not only annoyed by our curiosities 
but lets it be known that he is annoyed. He avoids 
the hotel keepers because they are so "irksome." 
One of his first experiences was in knocking at the 
door of an acquaintance ; Mr. Janson asked the 
domestic who opened to him, "Is your master at 
home?" "I have no master." "Don't you live 
here?" "I 5to;y here." "And who are you then?" 

"Why, I am Mr 's help. I'd have you know, 

man, that I'm no servant." ^ 

In 1833 in his "Men and Manners in America," 
Hamilton shows his motive : — 

"When I found the institutions and the experience of the 
United States quoted in the reformed ParUament as aflfording 

^ Vol. I, p. 83. 

Janson copies from a paper in Salem, Mass., the following: — 

" Died in Salem, James Verry, aged twelve, a promising youth, 
whose early death is supposed to have been brought on by excessive 
smoking." 

The author claims to have seen this practice very generally 
among mere children. Several other writers note this excessive 
use of tobacco among the young. 

^ It is a pleasure to hear William Brown of Leeds, England, 
who was here four years, say plainly that he met no proud people, 
but only those in very humble circumstances. — "America," 1849. 



28 AS OTHERS SEE US 

safe precedent for British legislation, and learned that the 
drivelers who uttered such nonsense, instead of encountering 
merited derision, were listened to with patient approbation 
by men as ignorant as themselves, I certainly did feel that 
another work on America was yet wanted." 

For nearly fifty years of the period here covered, 
it was a social advantage in England to print evi- 
dences against the United States. This may be 
seen in the tiptoe anxiety with which Buckingham 
beseeches His Majesty to look with favor on his 
fat volumes. It was obvious in Tom Moore, 
Dickens, and Mrs. Trollope. 

In his " Diary "^ Marryat writes: — 

"Never was there such an opportunity of testing the merits 
of a republic, of ascertaining if such a form of government 
could be maintained — in fact, of proving whether an en- 
lightened people could govern themselves." 

When Harriet Martineau wrote her slashing review 
of his book, Marryat replied, " My object was to do 
injury to democracy." He desires that his opinions 
on democracy shall be "read by every tradesman 
and mechanic: pored over even by milliners' girls 
and boys behind the counter, and thumbed to pieces 
in every petty circulating library. I wrote the book 
with this object, and I wrote it accordingly." 

This gifted writer, coming with so fixed a purpose, 
will, of course, find what he came for. After the 
same manner Thomas Brothers says, "My principal 
object was to convince you . . . that under what 

' Vol. I, p. 132. 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 29 

is called self-government there may be as much 
oppression, poverty, and worthlessness, as under 
any other form of government." He gives 254 
closely printed pages in appendices, v^hich are a 
solid collection of horrors and disgrace taken from 
the press. 

What was the chief object of Mrs. Trollope? 
"To encourage her countrymen to hold fast by a 
constitution that insures all the blessings vi^hich 
flow from established habits and solid principles." 
"If they forego these, they will incur the fearful 
risks of breaking up their repose by introducing the 
jarring tumult and universal degradation which 
invariably follow the wild scheme of placing all the 
power of the State in the hands of the populace." 
Henceforth, in great abundance, this lady finds at 
every turn supporting evidence. 

I do not claim that these predispositions destroy 
the value of the criticisms. They do, however, 
enable us, in making them an object of study, to 
classify and use them with more intelligence. 

We have no difficulty with Francis Wyse and his 
three volumes when we know why he came. He 
wanted to warn all healthy Englishmen not to leave 
their country. English employers will certainly 
have to pay higher wages if this emigration continues ; 
therefore, Americans are the least trustworthy of 
nations — they have a notorious and abominable 
disregard for truth and no regard for contracts. ^ 

* "America: Its Realities and Resources," F. Wyse, 3 vols. 



30 AS OTHERS SEE US 

In this study of motives that merry poet, Tom 
Moore, is admirable as an example. His stinging 
lines against us stirred bitterness and rage in the 
hearts of thousands of Americans. It is a curious 
sort of American that cannot to-day read the rhymed 
squibs of this poet without any rankling. We were 
a fair target for some of those metered shafts. But 
more than this, we know about the poet just as we 
know about Mrs. Trollope. She was in the sorest 
stress for money. Her last resource for raising funds 
in Cincinnati had gone with her Bazaar. She must 
write a book about the Americans and about their 
manners from which she had suffered most. In a 
raw town of twenty thousand people, she had 
watched America from the windows of a second-class 
boarding-house. If her book was to sell, it must 
sell in England. Nine-tenths of the people who 
bought books at that time thought extremely ill of 
this country. With that class feeling constantly in 
mind, the disappointed woman wrote her volumes. 
Mr, Weller senior fully explains her and her kind, 
" An then let him come back and write a book about 
the 'Merrikins as'll pay all his expenses and more, 
if he blows 'em up enough." 

It was not essentially different with the Irish poet. 
The son of a Dublin grocer, he goes up to London 
where he becomes at once the darling among fashion- 
able diners out. "Where Tom sits no host feels 
insecure." The poet can entertain all companies. 
He comes to the United States in 1804, but loves 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 31 

best to dine with English officers, many of whose 
ships were then here. What do the poet's entertainers 
relish so much as merry verses and smart hits at the 
expense of the rustics on land ? Over the rim of the 
champagne glass, or writing to Lady This or Lord 
That, he paints his word-pictures — a kind of rake's 
progress — solely for ears that delight in our dis- 
repute. 

When Lord John Russell says in his preface to 
Moore's letters, " the sight of democracy triumphant 
soon disgusted him," we know that the poet's con- 
clusion was as much expected as it was pleasurable. 
He goes from Norfolk to Baltimore over roads 
that were "as barbarous as the inhabitants." He 
writes : — 

"How often has it occurred to me that nothing can be 
more emblematic of the government of this country than 
its stages, filled with a motley mixture, all 'hail fellow well 
met,' driving through mud and filth, which bespatters them 
as they raise it, and risking an upset at every step. ... As 
soon as I am away from them, both the stages and the gov- 
ernment may have the same fate for what I care." 

From Washington he writes to Lord Forbes that 
the days of Columbia are already numbered, for 
on her brow — 

"The showy smile of young presumption plays, 
Her bloom is poison'd and her heart decays." 

"Already has she pour'd her poison here 
O'er every charm that makes existence dear." 



32 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"With honest scorn for that inglorious soul 
Which creeps and winds beneath a mob's control, 
Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabble's nod, 
And makes like Egypt every beast a god." 

"Take Christians, Mohawks, democrats and all, 
From the rude wigwam to the Congress hall, — 
'Tis one dull chaos, one infertile strife 
Betwixt half-polished and half-barbarous life." 

These tuneful amenities contain the same opinions 
of us that we find in the private affectionate letters 
to his mother. He betrays thus no inconsistency. 

Merely to state the social setting of this favorite 
minstrel and the time in which he wrote, should 
leave the most ardent patriot among us quite serene. 
There was even some excuse, as 1804 was the year 
when party scurrility and vindictiveness reached 
perhaps the lowest pitch in our history. The lam- 
poons of Callender against Jefferson were of an 
incredible grossness that the present day would not 
for an instant tolerate. That the President was 
guilty of miscellaneous amours was the least of the 
charges. We may be certain that many a Federalist 
assured the poet that these libels were true. They 
knew Callender to be coarsely venal and a liar ; 
they called him so while he was their enemy. But 
now that, as turncoat, he attacked Jefferson, his 
coarsest blackguardism was welcome. The histo- 
rian Morse says, " Every Federalist writer hastened 
to draw for his own use bucketful after bucketful 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 33 

from Callender's foul reservoir and the gossip about 
Jefferson's graceless debaucheries was sent into 
every household in the United States." The New 
England clergy took so active a hand in these defa- 
mations that Jefferson wrote: ''From the clergy I 
expect no mercy. They crucified the Saviour, who 
preached that their Kingdom was not of the world : 
and all who practise on that precept must expect 
the extreme of their wrath." Josiah Quincy said 
Jefferson was a "transparent fraud" and his fol- 
lowers "ruffians." From Pickering, Cabot, Rufus 
King, Fisher Ames, and Griswold — the very light 
and leading of social respectability — the same omi- 
nous judgments may be quoted, while to the 
president of Yale College our government was in 
possession of "blockheads and knaves." These 
model citizens were at that moment freely circulating 
against Jefferson such bits of gossip as that "he had 
obtained his property by fraud and robbery; that 
in one instance he had defrauded and robbed a widow 
and fatherless children of an estate to which he was 
executor, of ten thousand pounds sterling," etc. 

We are to-day justly sensitive against any insinua- 
tion that the high judiciary is corrupt, but in 1804 
there was circulated in the press by a member of 
the Supreme Bench a charge that " the independence 
of the national judiciary is shaken to its founda- 
tions" and that "mobocracy" had us finally in its 

grip- 
It is into this atmosphere that the Irish poet comes. 



34 AS OTHERS SEE US 

From the "best citizens" he hears night after night 
more damaging criticism against our democracy 
than any which he puts into verse. He is only trying 
to find good rhymes for what well-to-do Americans 
tell him about their government. 

The essence of revolution is the passing of power 
from one class to another. Federal control, with the 
lingering intellectual feudalism still inhering in it, 
was beginning to pass to the democrats at the open- 
ing of the nineteenth century. Nowhere among 
these foreign critics is there such bitter censure as 
our own "Society" was everywhere heaping upon 
the new democracy. It was "as destitute of man- 
ners as it was of morals and religion." It had 
"robbed life of decency and the future of hope." 
These cheerful confidences were dinner table coin 
from Philadelphia to Boston. An English visitor 
in 1824 says: "These Americans are so merciless 
in criticising their own government that nothing 
is left over for the outsider." 

These drawing-room aspersions were still at white 
heat when Miss Martineau came thirty years later. 
She was at first welcomed by very aristocratic 
families "as the most distinguished woman that had 
come to us." Of her reception she writes: — 

"The first gentleman who greeted me on my arrival in 
the United States, a few minutes after I had landed, in- 
formed me, without delay, that I had arrived at an unhappy 
crisis; that the institutions of the country would be in ruin 
before my return to England; that the levelling spirit was 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 35 

desolating society; and that the United States were on the 
verge of a military despotism." '■ 

Her own honest human sympathies protected her 
from this influence. But the average foreign critic 
had only to hsten to such talk and then turn it to his 
own use. He is talking about us as those among 
us out of power were themselves talking. 

When this is clear, there is little to resent. When 
we know that Sydney Smith had made a disastrous 
money investment in this country, we sympathize 
with his invective. 

When Kipling first came, he was smarting against 
us because we had pirated his books. In this mood 
he found the first city in which he landed "inhabited 
by the insane"; the reporters were all like "rude 
children"; our speech was "a horror"; everybody 
was "wolfing" his food; and even our American 
enterprise was only "grotesque ferocity." 

We can explain and account for many of our 
critics, leaving behind as little justifiable irritation 
on our part as in the case of Moore and Kipling. 
We object to a man like Thomas Ashe, because he 
was a plain liar, not because he finds fault with us. 
When Isaac Weld says our mosquitoes bite through 
the thickest boots, and a French author gets William 
Penn over here in the Mayflower, we are prepared 
to discount some of their confident generalizations. 
M. Moreau, as he closes a well-meant volume,^ 

* "Society in America," Vol. I, p. 98. 
^ " L'Envers des Etats-Unis." 



36 AS OTHERS SEE US 

relieves us generally of all difficulty in fixing his 
place among serious critics. Our road to ruin, ac- 
cording to him, is the drunkenness of our women. 
M. Moreau has just left us, so that his information 
startles us by its newness. Not only does the 
American woman drink, but she drinks like Falstaff. 
He sees the curse not merely as a cloud on our 
horizon, but as a heavy pall that threatens the very 
light of the nation's life. He compares the pro- 
gressive deterioration to the rolling snowball, gath- 
ering weight and mass as it hurries to destruction. 
His words are strong. This plague among our 
women is an "atrocious evil," "a terrible menace." 
His climax of dismay at our impending doom 
culminates when he asks, "Are there exceptions?" 
As a friend of ours, he would fain believe that 
exceptions exist, yet the number of semi- sots is so 
great that he is in doubt. That the women 
drinkers "constitute a very strong majority" he is 
firmly convinced. He is moved to qualify his 
statement so far as to admit that it is rare to see 
the women "fall an inert mass" from intoxication, 
but in dangerous degrees they drink "so as to act 
unconsciously." ^ 

This gentleman has seen a great deal of our life 
and met or corresponded with some of the ablest 

* An Englishman writes that while the man in the United 
States consumes enormous quantities of liquor in the form of 
"coffee varnish" and "dead man's pallor," "if a woman took a 
glass of wine, they would send for the police." 



CONCERNING OUR CRITICS 37 

Americans. I have tried to get the history of his 
dire prophecy of our downfall through woman's 
inebriety. In part at least it is this. There are a 
good many country clubs about our larger cities, 
frequented by lively young women who take great 
liberties with highballs and cocktails. They often 
order them with much bravado and with a kind of 
expansion that seems to fill the entire landscape. 
It is something from which one would like to look 
away, but its very singularity and extravagance hold 
the attention. The larger city has also a group of 
popular restaurants, patronized alike by the half- 
world and by those who feel far above it, but cannot 
be quite sure, except by close and constant inspection 
of their moral inferiors. Any and all of these much- 
haunted resorts would give a touring stranger just 
the opinion which Monsieur Moreau came to enter- 
tain. If he saw the most highly paced among our 
various smart sets, he might again draw sinister 
inferences about our future. But to draw large con- 
clusions about national morals from these vagabond 
data is to lose one's head as a competent observer. 
As far as possible serious critics alone will here 
claim our attention. 

Among our visitors are the following : — 
From France, Brissot de Warville; the Count de 
S^gur; the Dukes La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt 
and de Lausan; the Marquis of Chastellux; Cha- 
teaubriand ; Lafayette ; Volney (he of the Ruins) ; 
Prince Talleyrand; De Gasparin; a son of 



38 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Napoleon's favorite General Murat, who was here 
many years; De Tocqueville; Ampere; the Duke 
of Chartres (Louis Philippe); the Utopian Cabet; 
the economist Chevalier sent on a brief mission by 
Thiers but becoming so interested that he spent 
two years ; the sociologist De Rousier ; Professor 
Claudio Janet ; the present Prime Minister Clemen- 
ceau; the publicist Carlier; the academician Paul 
Bourget ; Madame Blanc (Th. Bcntzon) ; Edmond 
de Nevers; Paul Adam; Abbe Klein; and Pastor 
Wagner. 

From England have come Robert Owen; the 
Trollopes, mother and son; Harriet Martineau; 
Mrs. Jameson; Marryat; Dickens; Thackeray; 
Cobden; Fanny Kemble; Combe; and the re- 
doubtable Cobbett ; Sir Charles Lyell (four volumes) ; 
Tyndall; Huxley; Spencer; Frederic Harrison; 
Matthew Arnold; John Morley; Freeman, the 
historian; Kipling; Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer; 
James Bryce; and Joseph Chamberlain. 

From Germany: F. J. Grund; J. I. Kohl; Weit- 
ling, the socialist; Professor von Raumer; Prince 
von Wied ; F. Bodenstedt ; Herr Grillenberger ; Von 
Hoist ; Von Polenz ; Karl Zimmermann ; Professor 
Munsterberg; the historian Lamprecht; Fulda, 
the dramatist ; and Professor Andreas Baumgarten. 

In the way of approval, of censure, or of warning, 
these observers should have a various message from 
which a little open-mindedness and good-will on our 
part ought to pluck some profit. 



CHAPTER III 

WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 

The foreign students of this country have far less 
difficuhy with our institutions, our government, our 
education, and general resources than with our more 
personal life. What has been done on this continent or 
left undone may be brought to judgment. But, Who 
is the American ? He is the main object of inquiry. 

Sometimes the question is. What kind of human 
being are they making in the United States ? Again 
it is, What institutions are here being shaped by the 
American character? In both, it is the sort of man 
and woman in the making that is of fundamental 
interest to the inquirer. What, then, is the human 
product called the American? 

The English historian Freeman used to speak of 
us as a lot of Englishmen who had strayed from 
home. We had taken with us a complete outfit of 
political and other traditions that we were working 
out under slightly different conditions. When he 
came here in 1883, he still said, "To me most cer- 
tainly the United States did not seem a foreign 
country, it was simply England with a difference." 

Something of this is in the thought of Matthew 
Arnold when he speaks of George Washington as if 
39 



40 AS OTHERS SEE US 

he were really an Englishman who was accidentally 
in America. We Americans should be made to 
understand that we had appropriated him far too 
exclusively. To understand Washington, we must 
learn to think of him as a good model of the Eng- 
lish County Squire, — somewhat above the average 
of course, but a type very common and not in the 
least dazzling to the properly informed Englishman. 
Less than thirty years ago Bryce wrote, " The Ameri- 
can people is the English people modified in some 
directions by the circumstances of its colonial life 
and its more popular government, but in essentials 
the same." 

In 1795 Timothy D wight was chosen president of 
Yale College, From that time until the publication 
of his " Travels " in four volumes, he journeyed 
some 14,000 miles in New England and New York, 
knowing that eastern country probably better than 
any other man. In his 477th letter he thus speaks of 
Boston: "The Bostonians, almost without excep- 
tion, are derived from one country and a single stock. 
They are all descendants of Englishmen, and of 
course are all united by all the bonds of society: 
language, religion, government, manners, and in- 
terests." ^ Nearly half a century ago, Godley could 
speak of Boston as the best place for the stranger 
to see national characteristics "in their most unmixed 
and most developed state." ^ 

* Dwight's "Travels," 182 1, Vol. I, p. 506. 

* "Letters from America," London, 1844, Vol. II, p. 136. 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 4 1 

Boston was then puritan ; to-day it is catholic. 
It has nearly thirty nationalities. Yet until the Civil 
War, we still had confident descriptions of the 
American, as if he stood sufficiently apart and disen- 
gaged from other peoples to admit of characteriza- 
tion. The Italians discovered us, throngs of French, 
Dutch, and Germans very early made their homes 
among us. There was yet enough in common, until 
the middle of the last century, to make the question. 
What is the American, at least intelligible. But 
what meaning can it have to-day? New York is 
already the chief Jewish city of the world. It will 
very soon have a million Hebrews. They come with 
qualities and traditions so diverse that their compe- 
tition among themselves (as between German and 
Russian Jews) is as relentless as it is against any 
other class of the community. 

Intelligent enough to leave petty gambling and 
drunkenness to the Christians, they are appropriating 
rapidly the very forms of property which give them 
the strongest grip upon the destinies of the city. 
Their capacity for work, their thrift, their family de- 
votion, their temperance and consequent low death 
rate, their sacrifices for education, their passion for 
individualism, already modify our life, although in 
our eighty-five millions they are a tiny fraction of a 
million and a half. Christians have never hesitated 
to classify and characterize the Jews as specifically 
this or that. But as we know them better, the 
characterization becomes blurred and uncertain. 



42 AS OTHERS SEE US 

How confidently we have repeated it ! The Jew is 
not a "producer." "He swaps and bargains and 
exchanges, but he shuns the processes of producing 
wealth." It is very slovenly reasoning to shut out 
these trading activities from "production"; but 
apart from this, the slightest observation would 
correct this easy judgment. One of our great in- 
dustries is the clothing trade, which in its entire 
process is largely in the hands of Jews, as other 
industries are in part on their purely "productive" 
side. 

I have asked a great many people what one 
quality could surely be fixed upon the American. 
I have a long list of answers, but the one that heads 
the list in point of frequency is that the American, 
above all other peoples, is "adaptable." It is of 
course meant by this that the young American is 
early thrown upon his own resources ; that our society 
has such mobility and range of opportunity as to 
create the capacity for self-adjustment — of falling 
upon the feet — in whatever part of the world one 
alights.^ But are we more "adaptable" than the 
Jew? With centuries of savage hounding hither 
and yon, what race ever had such occasion and 
necessity to learn adaptability as this one? Is 
there any delay in adjusting themselves to our 

* Professor Leo S. Rowe, returning from long journeys among 
the South American peoples, tells me that the American is handi- 
capped there precisely because he is less "adaptable" than the 
German. 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 43 

economic and educational opportunities? If the 
Jew has a department store in a Southern city, he 
succeeds partly because he is so flexible in falling 
in with the peculiarities of blacks and whites alike. 
To say Miss or Mrs. to the colored purchaser is to 
get her trade. I hear it charged against the Jew 
that he will not stay upon a farm. As small farming 
has hitherto been done, this refusal of the Jew with- 
out capital is an assured sign of his intelligence. 
There is already indication that when farming is 
raised to its proper level ; when science and good busi- 
ness methods are applied to it ; when, in a word, it 
is commercialized and thoroughly worth doing, the 
Jew will be at the front in this work. To say that 
this people loves money, is sharp at a trade, has 
push, is aggressive, is merely to repeat what no end of 
foreigners have ascribed to Yankees generally. An 
Englishman who did business for several years in 
this country between 1840 and 1850, warns his 
countrymen against the Americans in these words, 
"Let him gain a foothold and before you are aware 
of it, you will find his hand laid upon all you possess, 
from your pocket handkerchief to the house that 
covers your head." ^ A friend, who has published a 
monograph on race questions, tells me there is one 
trait that he is sure is peculiar to Hebrews. Their 
aggressiveness has the unfailing trait of "intellectual 
impudence." Frechheit is a fair translation of this 
modified "impudence," and I have often heard in 

* Brown's "America." 



44 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Germany that the truest mark of the Jew was this 
same Frechheit. But to what people under the sun 
would this name not be affixed, if they were as per- 
sistent and successful in playing the accepted com- 
petitive game as are the Jews ? This labelling fares ill, 
even with a race so sharply outlined as the Hebrew. 
What, then, shall be said of the American, now 
that nearly fifty nationalities are knitted into our 
national texture? In great areas of the Northwest 
one seems to be in Scandinavia, as large parts of 
several cities are like another Leipzig. We have 
"little Chinas" and "little Polands." In Lowell, 
Massachusetts, one may find himself in a Greece 
that is not even little. We have a hundred "little 
Italys" in our cities, and whole villages of them in 
the South and West, as in Worcester he may find 
himself in Armenia. As for Eastern and Southern 
Europeans, they are so in evidence in industries like 
iron and mining that an American laborer seems 
foreign and out of place. These piebald millions are 
now so interwoven with all that we are ; at so many 
points we have been changed by their presence, that to 
silhouette the American becomes yearly more baffling.* 

* " In nineteen of the Northern States of our Republic the num- 
ber of the foreign-born and their immediate descendants exceeds 
the number of the native-born. In the largest cities the number 
is two-thirds, and even three-quarters. There are more Cohens 
than Smiths in the New York Directory. Two-thirds of the labor- 
ers in our factories are foreign-born or of foreign parentage. New 
England is no longer puritan but foreign." — "Aliens of Ameri- 
cans," by B. Grose, p. 236. 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 45 

The early writers have no misgivings. In the 
following chapter we shall see above twenty confident 
traits set down to index the American off from other 
nationalities. Especially after the Civil War this 
confidence abates. The perplexities become too 
obvious. The railway facilities bring the visitor 
into contact with too many kinds of Americans. 
In 1889, I met a German correspondent who had 
been four times to the United States. He had done 
high-class work for what was then thought to be the 
ablest continental paper, the Cologne Gazette. He 
said he brought back from his first journey a clearly 
conceived image of the American. He was " sharp- 
visaged, nervous, lank, and restless." ^ After the 
second trip this group of adjectives was abandoned. 
He saw so many people who were not lank or nervous ; 
so many who were rotund and leisurely, that he re- 
arranged his classification, but still with confidence. 
After the third trip he insisted that he could describe 
our countrymen, but not in external signs. He was 
driven to express them in terms of character. The 
American was resourceful, inventive, and supreme 

* "The Yankee is a tall, gaunt, yellow-faced, hungry- looking 
dyspeptic. He is generally engaged in selling some very odd 
article, such as a button-hook and a cigarette-holder combined, 
or a pair of socks which change into an umbrella when you 
touch a hidden spring." 

De Nevers, with many years' experience in the United States, 
sums up his conclusions as to our fundamental characteristics thus: 
"The love of gain, the spirit of practical achievement, curiosity, 
a rather supercilious exclusiveness and contempt for the foreigner." 
— "L'Ame Americaine," Vol. II, p. 94. 



46 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in the pursuit of material ends. "My fourth trip," 
he said, "has knocked out the final attempt with the 
others. I have thrown them all over like a lot of 
rubbish. I now don't know what the American is, 
and I don't believe any one else knows." He still 
thought we were more in a hurry than any other folk. 
Beyond that, he was certain of no distinctive differ- 
ence. On this remnant of confidence there is now a 
very curious comment. So competent an observer 
as Professor Miinsterberg, eager to set German 
opinion right on America, says we are not even in a 
hurry. This conclusion has great surprises for us 
and is worth quoting. 

"It has often been observed, and especially remarked on by 
German observers, that in spite of his extraordinary tension, 
the American never overdoes. The workingman in the fac- 
tory, for example, seldom perspires at his work. This comes 
from a knowledge of how to work so as in the end to get out 
of one's self the greatest possible amount. 

"Very much the same may be said of the admirable way 
in which the Americans make the most of their time. Super- 
ficial observers have often supposed the American to be 
always in a hurry, whereas the opposite is the case. The man 
who has to hurry has badly disposed of his time, and, there- 
fore, has not the necessary amount to finish any one piece of 
work. The American is never in a hurry." ^ 

* More recently still, as good an observer as H. W. Horwill 
finds us conspicuous for our careless, leisurely ways. He writes 
in an English monthly that we can potter and dawdle as if life 
were a continuous holiday. He has an array of evidence to make 
good his point. Think of the time spent by thousands of smaller 
business men in the innumerable "orders" and societies that fill our 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 47 

Here is a conflict of opinion over a generalization 
that has been world-wide and is surely among our 
own beliefs about ourselves. This scholar who has 
been among us so many years now takes from us 
even this source of pride. If our preeminence as 
hustlers is to be put in question, what, pray, is left 
to us? 

One writer, after journeys in Canada and Aus- 
tralia, first notes that the American can only be 
detected by his speech. He finds us so like the 
Australians that were it not for our "intonation," 
he should think himself in Victoria or New South 
Wales. He then travels some months through the 
West and South, concluding at last that "there are 
as many different ways of speaking in various parts 
of the United States as there are in England. I 
sometimes thought myself in Yorkshire, sometimes 
among London cockneys, and sometimes among the 
best bred people." 

American "accent" (a word covering almost 
everything except accent) has played a great role 

towns ! Study our sports from racing to baseball at which vast mul- 
titudes are constantly seen ! Even when we are hard-pushed and 
ought to hurry, he thinks us very awkward. An American who is in 
a hurry, he says, "will unhesitatingly take a car for two or three 
blocks rather than cover the same distance more quickly by walking, 
just as he will wait two or three minutes for an elevator to take 
him down a flight of ten steps, or will bring the resources of his 
typewriter to bear upon a postcard — which could be more 
speedily written by hand," The English workingmen brought 
here by Mr. Mosley were constantly expressing their surprise that 
they saw so little of this high pressure work. 



48 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in marking us off among the nations. Yet this 
traveller, when he comes to judge the people as a 
whole, is in despair. "I can," he says, "tell how 
they speak in any one of a dozen sections, but not 
how the American speaks." 

Our trouble is scarcely less if we confine ourselves 
to the American woman or the American child. 
From Liancourt to Bryce, our women folk have 
proved a shining mark for flattering characteriza- 
tion, but the young girl and the child have had lam- 
pooning enough. Nor is there against a good deal 
of this criticism the slightest honest defence. That 
far too many of our children are grievously undis- 
ciplined, "lack reverence," are "loud and ill-man- 
nered," registers the most obvious fact. Yet it is 
a partial one, not in the least inclusive of the Ameri- 
can child.^ Most of these travellers lived in hotels 
and boarding-houses. It was here that many of 
them took their impressions of youthful deportment. 

* "And then the children — babies I should say, if I were speak- 
ing of English bairns of their age; but, seeing that they are 
Americans, I hardly dare to call them children. The actual age 
of these perfectly civilized and highly educated beings may be from 
three to four. One will often find five or six such seated at the 
long dinner table of the hotel, breakfasting and dining with their 
elders, and going through the ceremony with all the gravity and 
more than all the decorum of their grandfathers." — AnthonV 
Trollope. 

Sixty years ago an English merchant who was "struck dumb" 
by the precocity of the American child, says he knew of one that 
ran away from home when only five months old. When caught, 
the child was master of the situation — "I heard they's going to 
call me Jotham and I jes' lit out." 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 49 

The fidgety and noisy were of course most in evi- 
dence, and thus are etched into many an unlovely 
picture in this foreign literature. Writers like 
Thackeray and Miss Martineau, who see the child 
in our better homes, defend us most handsomely. 
Thackeray was charmed by the gay and playful 
familiarities between parent and child, much pre- 
ferring it to the more formal relation which he 
recalls in England. Miss Martineau devotes a 
chapter to our children. She is careful to say that 
she finds everywhere "spoiled, pert, and selfish 
children." She sees that many are given too much 
rein and left without discipline. These exceptions 
do not, however, lessen her confidence that the 
freedom and familiarity are upon the whole a distinct 
gain for the child and for society. What moves her 
most to this conclusion is the general happiness of 
American children : — 

"I have a strong suspicion that the faults of temper so preva- 
lent where parental authority is strong and where children are 
made as insignificant as they can be made, and the excellence 
of temper in America, are attributable to the different manage- 
ment of childhood in the one article of freedom." ' 

Mental alertness she also thinks has surer develop- 
ment. 

"If I had at home gone in among eighty or a hundred little 
people, between the ages of eight and sixteen, I should have 
extracted little more than 'Yes, ma'am,' and 'No, ma'am.' 
At Baltimore, a dozen boys and girls at a time crowded around 

* Vol. Ill, p. 163, English Ed., "Society in America." 
£ 



50 AS OTHERS SEE US 

me, questioning, discussing, speculating in a way which 
enchanted me." 

About the American woman there are the same 
cheerful generaHzations. Many chapters are de- 
voted to her. Early writers note her pruderies, her 
frigid reserve before miscellaneous gallantries, and 
her "lack of temperament." Ampere and Fanny 
Kemble are astonished at the extreme deference that 
men pay her, especially on the street and in all public 
places.^ That a young girl can travel unattended 
from State to State, secure from insult or importunity, 
calls out admiring comment from critics of every 
nationality. Especially since the habit of travelling 
has developed with the railway, few things have 
more frequent mention than this serene young 
woman journeying alone and unalarmed where and 
when she will. In a severely critical lecture on the 
United States, I heard the historian Von Treitschke 
say to his class in Berlin, that even the enemies of 
America saw in this deference to the unprotected 
woman "a most hopeful sign of civilization." That 
she would be unsafe in Europe, he thought, marked, 
in this one respect, inferiority in the European social 
morals. Even if, at home and abroad, we have not 

^ De Tocqueville says: "It has often been remarked that in 
Europe a certain degree of contempt lurks even in the flattery 
which men lavish upon women; although a European frequently 
affects to be the slave of woman, it may be seen that he never 
sincerely thinks her his equal. In the United States, men seldom 
compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem 
them." Vol. II, p. 260. 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 51 

rather overworked this soUtary young lady en 
voyage, she is too individual a phenomenon to be of 
much use to us. 

Miss Faithful in her struggles to characterize our 
girls quotes the following : * — 

"The most fascinating little despot in the world ; an oasis of 
picturesque unreasonableness in a dreadful desert of common 
sense." 

"Champagny — glittering, foamy, bubbly, sweet, dry, tart; 
in a word, fizzy! She has not the dreamy, magical, mur- 
mury loveableness of the Italian, but there is a cosmopolitan 
combination which makes her a most attractive coquette; a 
sort of social catechism — full of answer and question." 

This does not wholly satisfy her, but her own con- 
clusion is as tremulous in its uncertainty as the rest, 
save in its good -will, — 

"Miss Alcott's Joes and Dolly Wards, Bret Harte's Higgles 
and M'liss, and Mr. James's Daisy Miller, — indeed, I feel 
more and more bewildered as I try to think which should be 
taken as strictly typical — save the one, 

"So frankly free, 
So tender and so good to see, 
Because she is so sweet." 

When writer after writer says America is "the 
Paradise for Women," we have a formula that 
submits to closer tests. 

I was once on a Fall River boat with an English 
clergyman who had a passion for sociological sta- 
tistics. He was so struck by the numbers of people 

* "Three Visits to America," p. 316. 



52 AS OTHERS SEE US 

puffing at pipes, cigarettes, or cigars that he made 
conscientious note of it, telUng me that ninety per 
cent of our people must be users of tobacco. This 
appeared excessive, and I asked him where he got 
his estimates. He said he had counted all the 
people smoking and not smoking in the large space 
into which we came from the wharf. He was much 
shaken, when I told him that all his reckoning had 
been made in the boat's smoking room. 

America as the "Paradise for Women" is an 
improvement on the statistical reflections of this 
clergyman, but it too has to be challenged. As 
compared to most of Europe, burdens are here 
lighter and opportunities more open for women who 
must work for a living. But there are some millions 
of wives of wage-earning men and other millions 
of farmers' wives. Is it quite a Paradise for them? 
As in summer months, "There is nobody in town" 
to leisurely city folk, so this Paradise is confined to a 
relatively small section of the community. Even for 
this limited portion, it is a "Paradise" that excites 
reflections. To have the fewest responsibilities; 
to have the children cared for by others; to have a 
good bank-account and the consequent leisure to do 
what one will, usually depicts this "Paradise." It 
is especially and always to have a good deal of so- 
called independence and freedom from the narrower 
household cares. To have a husband willing to 
slave while he furnishes the cash and is content to 
stay behind if he is not wanted, always makes the 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 53 

heaven of the American woman more complete in the 
eyes of these foreign naturalists. 

It was left for a French scholar to say the final and 
triumphant word upon woman's real place in the 
United States. He finds the propelling force even of 
our material masteries in our women. In France 
and in Europe generally the woman must, he says, 
suit her expenditure to her husband's earnings. 
Be they small or great, this duty she meets. But the 
glory and distinction of the American woman ; that 
which sets her apart as upon a pedestal from all her 
kind in other lands, is that she makes her husband 
earn what she wishes to spend. Petty obstacles 
like business rivals and trade conditions are not to 
be considered. What this exigent household queen 
wants, she must have and she gels it. It is not 
primarily the man, but the American woman who 
commands the business initiative. The root of all 
our commercial greatness is her ambition. Because 
her heart is set on those first necessities — the luxu- 
ries and superfluities — for that reason the railroads, 
stock-exchanges, mills, and mines are driven at 
white heat. It is man's business to work all the 
wonders of our business world in order that wifely 
expectations may not go unsatisfied. We thus get at 
the real origin of the much-noted American deference 
to woman. Fanny Kemble speaks for scores of 
these critics when she expresses her surprise that 
American men show such humility toward all 
women, even the humblest. The commonest ex- 



54 AS OTHERS SEE US 

planation of this attitude is the relative scarcity of 
women during the three or four generations when 
men were greatly in excess. To the average man 
seeking a mate under these circumstances politeness 
becomes his chief asset. I have heard a lady much 
in the social world say that the manners of boys 
varied according to the ratio of sexes at social enter- 
tainments. "If the young men are few and the 
girls many, the boys lose their grace and gallantry, 
and most of them act like boors." This Frenchman 
does much better. To him women evolve not only 
as Queen and Dictator, but as the propelling force 
behind all our commercial "initiative," "self-direc- 
tion," invention, and other greatness. This torch- 
bearer among the critics did not offer his explanation 
as a compliment to our women. But never have 
they received such flattery. It puts man as the 
weaker vessel in his proper place. We can now 
understand the document which Emily Faithful 
reproduces from the early dawn of the "Woman's 
Movement." She vouches for this speech in which 
Mrs. Skinner, two generations ago, sets us right as 
to man's place in the social order : — 

"Miss President, feller wimmen, and male trash generally, 
I am here to-day for the purpose of discussing woman's rights, 
recussing her wrongs, and cussing the men. 

"I believe sexes were created perfectly equal, with the 
woman a little more equal than the man. 

"I believe that the world to-day would be happier if man 
never existed. 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 55 

"As a success man is a failure, and I bless my stars my 
mother was a woman. (Applause.) 

"I not only maintain those principles, but maintain a shift- 
less husband besides. 

"They say man was created first — Well, s'pose he was. 
Ain't first experiments always failures? 

"The only decent thing about man was a rib, and that 
went to make something better. (Applause.) 

"And they throw into our faces about taking an apple. 
I'll bet five dollars that Adam boosted her up the tree, and 
only gave her the core. 

"And what did he do when he was found out? True to 
his masculine instincts he sneaked behind Eve, and said, 
"Twan't me; 'twas her,' and woman had to father everything, 
and mother it too. 

"What we want is the ballot, and the ballot we're bound to 
have, if we have to let down our back hair, and swim in a sea 
of gore." 

Another phase of this topic troubles our critics. 
Who is the "good," who is the "bad" American? 
To stiff conservatives, especially if they held the 
offices — the real American was always one who 
accepted rather slavishly the party platform. Carlier 
was thinking of our politics when he said, "The bad 
American is usually the best American." To show 
independence or to stand for some larger policy 
has ever brought out the reproach of being "un- 
American." We probably did not have five greater 
or more useful men in the half century that followed 
the Revolution than the reticent, educated, and 
resourceful young Swiss who landed here in 1790, 
Albert Gallatin. Though an aristocrat by birth, 



56 AS OTHERS SEE US 

with easy honors awaiting him at home, he turned 
his back upon them because of repubHcan sym- 
pathies that came to him Kke a religious conversion. 
The word democrat has no nobler sense than 
that which Gallatin put into every stroke of his great 
public service in this country. Yet throughout his 
most active career, he had to submit to this taunt of 
being a bad American. Men with very proud names 
were guilty of this ungenerous flouting. In our 
own day another splendid figure suffered from the 
same unhandsome conduct. Carl Schurz was show- 
ered with honors whenever principle allowed him 
to "stand pat," but at any brave departure he was 
told that he was "no true American." When he 
was fighting for some honor and humanity toward 
the Indians; when he tried to temper some of the 
blundering excesses of our reconstruction methods, 
as well as during his long and heroic struggle for 
the elementary decencies of Civil Service Reform, 
Mr. Schurz had to meet this coarse upbraiding of 
being un-American. He probably was never so 
genuinely an American as when that term was most 
hotly denied him, and this was as certainly true of 
Gallatin. To fight for the next step that constitutes 
progress should best define the American spirit. 
It should be the essence of this spirit to expand the 
conditions of political and social growth. Yet 
those who have struck out most resolutely for this 
enlargement have had to take the anathema — "no 
true American." 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 57 

The first speech I heard in Massachusetts in favor 
of the Australian ballot was attacked by a well-known 
jurist as being un-American and therefore to be 
condemned. In the West, during the stormy dis- 
cussions over free silver and the gold standard, I 
attended many meetings. None of the peppery 
phrases so stuck in my mind as those that charged 
the friends of the "single standard" with being un- 
American. I can still see a trembling and scornful 
finger pointing at some of us who had asked ques- 
tions. The speaker stirred all hearts by comparing 
the doubters to Judas. As he had bartered his 
soul, so had the gold men bartered theirs. "The 
soul of the true American has departed from them 
forever." Even at a meeting for the discussion of 
immigration, as good an American as I have ever 
known was angrily denied the name, because he 
steadfastly opposed plans for restricting immigrants. 

There is nothing more hopeful at the present 
moment in our country than the spirit at work in 
our new forestry policy. It is, fundamentally, the 
same use of government powers to protect large and 
general interests, as against narrow and immediate 
private interests that have come into sharp conflict 
with public welfare. Yet I have heard the policy 
condemned with extreme venom because it was not 
the American way of doing things. The most 
dangerous kind of ignorance can hide behind this 
name. A New Hampshire farmer and dairyman, 
irritated bv the standard of cleanliness which the 



58 AS OTHERS SEE US 

milk inspector submitted to him, burst out in reply, 
"Yes, I've read a good deal in the agricultural 
paper about this foolishness, but I'm an American 
and I propose to stay on bein' an American." In 
this sorry instance, to hold with sulky tenacity to 
the beaten path becomes the definition of this proud 
title. Few really illustrious names have wholly 
escaped the epithet — un-American. Washington 
and Hamilton lost all claim to it at the hands of the 
Jeffersonian pamphleteers. Nor did Lincoln go 
unscathed by Northern copperheads. When com- 
pelled to suspend habeas corpus in the heaviest 
days of 1863, the hiss of un- Americanism was heard 
on every hand. The most heroic moments in our 
history are precisely those in which men have dared 
to stand pluckily by some cause against which 
popular fury had temporarily turned. Young 
Quincy's defence of Captain Preston of "the Boston 
Massacre" was a splendid bit of gallantry. The 
frenzy against Preston in the community burned so 
high that the elder Quincy wrote indignantly to his 
son: "My God ! Is it possible? I will not believe 
it." The son answered that it was in his oath to aid 
those charged with crime, the guilt of which was not 
yet proved. To the angry reproach that his career 
would be ruined, he answered : " I never harbored the 
expectation, nor any great desire, that all men should 
speak well of me. To inquire my duty and to do it, 
is my aim." Months had not passed before it 
became plain that an atrocious injustice would have 



WHO IS THE AMERICAN? 59 

been committed to refuse this defence. Yet for 
moral intrepidity that adds lustre to those days and 
to all days, this young man was pronounced a bad 
and faithless American. 

In the winter of 1882, when James Russell Lowell 
was our Minister to England, he had to face delicate 
matters growing out of the "Coercion Act" against 
Ireland. Two Secretaries of State (Evarts and 
Blaine) had successively paid tribute to Mr. Lowell's 
"sagacity, prudeince, and fairness." Yet in and 
out of Congress the storm raged against him. At 
a great meeting in New York, "sickening syco- 
phancy" and "Apostate to true Americanism" were 
among the pretty compliments paid to him. 

As it has been in the past, so in the future this 
high test of moral courage will remain to try men's 
souls. Politics as well as religion tends to harden 
into institutional and dogmatic forms. To challenge 
these ; to break the enclosing crust so far as to give 
way for the inner life and growth, will ask of men 
to the end of time this same hardihood. The best 
Americans have ever been and will continue to be 
those who, while standing for social stability and 
order, dare to stand also for the changes that widen 
into social progress. 



CHAPTER IV 

OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 

I APPROACH this chapter with misgivings. When 
using the essential portions of it several times as a 
lecture, I have seen individuals leave the hall in a 
state of unmistakable displeasure. It was once 
given as the first of a series on the general subject 
with which these chapters deal. A protest was made 
to those having the lectures in charge that their 
continuance ought not to be permitted. As this 
was impracticable, a good many people took the 
question of continuing into their own hands and 
stayed away. It was maintained that "no true 
American would talk so about his country." As this 
lecture was immediately followed by one on the 
Sensitiveness of the American,^ it brought a humor- 
ous confirmation which somewhat softened the 
asperities of the situation. 

What was least tolerable to this wounded patriot- 
ism was an itemized comparison between some of 
our prancing Fourth of July oratory from eminent 
men and the broad caricatures of Dickens. In the 

» Chapter VI. 
60 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 6l 

"American Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit" our 
genius for self-laudation is travestied by this master 
with a free hand. Yet in our own oratorical zone, 
we can find the literary equivalents of Dickens's 
choicest specimens. One is honestly disconcerted 
as to which is the parody. When a senator can say 
at a banquet given by his constituents, that "America 
as a nation has now passed through the fiery furnace 
of doubt and obloquy, convincing the most ignorant 
of her foes and the most envious of her would-be 
rivals that our Republic stands at last as unstained 
in her matchless record as she is superior in all the 
higher attainments of a true moral and spiritual 
civilization," we think instinctively of the passages 
in "Martin Chuzzlewit." Does the most riotous 
burlesque of Dickens much outdo this senatorial 
outburst ? 

It is of course true that among nations we do 
not hold a monopoly of gasconade. It is very 
probable that the fete-day literature of other nations 
would furnish rodomontade equal to our best. That 
would only enlarge the geographical area of the 
plague. There are, moreover, so many ways of 
bragging. It may be stentorian and grandiloquent 
like that of Victor Hugo. It may be the sheer bluster 
of a Colonel Chick, "What is America /or but to 
reform the world?" It may appear in the ineffable 
strut of the Prussian lieutenant, or in the unvoiced 
but unmistakable assumption of superiority that the 
world has very generally associated with the British. 



62 AS OTHERS SEE US 

This has often a most naive and unabashed state- 
ment, as when Alexander Mackay says : ^ — 

"England has her fixed position in the family of nations, 
and at the head of civilization — a position which she has long 
occupied, and from which it will be some time ere she is driven. 
We care not, therefore, what the foreigner says or thinks of us. 
He may look or express contempt as he walks our streets, or 
frequents our public places. His praise cannot exalt, nor can 
his contempt debase us, as a people." 

This special form of bragging is attributed to us : — 

"Other nations boast of what they are or have been, but 
the true citizen of the United States exalts his head to the skies 
in the contemplation of what the grandeur of his country is 
going to be. Others claim respect and honor because of the 
things done by a long line of ancestors; an American glories 
in the achievements of a distant posterity. 

"If an English traveller complains of their inns and hints 
his dislike to sleeping four in a bed, he is first denounced as a 
calumniator and then told to wait a hundred years and see 
the superiority of American inns to British." ^ 

Even that learned French publicist, M. Chevalier, 
who is very friendly, cannot help warning us against 

» "The Western World," p. 285. 

Bryce says, "An impartially rigorous censor from some other 
planet might say of the Americans that they are at this moment less 
priggishly supercilious than the Germans, less restlessly pretentious 
than the French, less pharisaically self-satisfied than the English." 
-Vol. II, p. 635. 

^ This exact comment De Amicis makes on the people as he 
journeys about Holland, "They are always talking of what they 
are going to do and almost never of what they have done," but, 
curiously enough, he interprets this in terms of humility. — 
"La Hollande," p. 96. 



it- ^ 



Mrs. Trollope 
Author of "The Domestic Manners of the Americans ' 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 63 

all illusions about the real thing in matters of na- 
tional preeminence. He says : — 

"It is because France is the heart of the world; the affairs 
of France interest all ; the cause which she espouses is not that 
of a selfish ambition, but that of civilization. When France 
speaks, she is listened to, because she speaks not her own feel- 
ings merely, but those of the human race. When she acts, 
her example is followed, because she does what all desire to 
do." ' 

Another Frenchman is less considerate of our 
sensibilities when he says that "French civilization 
is so above and apart from that of all other peoples, 
that his countrymen need not shrink from encourag- 
ing a people like those in the United States in their 
ambition to imitate the glories of France." This 
has a loftiness with which Victor Hugo has made the 
world familiar. 

It will lessen the smart, as we turn for our punish- 
ment, to remember these various eruptions of self- 
laudation. 

That our special variety of braggadocio is ex- 
tremely offensive to all sorts of foreigners, there is 

' D'Almbert, in his " Flaneries," gives one special reason why 
the French should travel: Until they have looked in upon several 
nations lying in outer darkness, there is no way to measure the 
heights of French civilization. " Just cross the frontier and it at 
once begins to dawn upon us how unrivalled we stand in all the 
tests of moral and spiritual refinement. Our morals are probes, 
elegantes etfaciles, and our character, chivalrous, loyal, and with- 
out selfishness. Yet, we must travel, travel, especially to the 
United States, only to see how wisely the good God has given the 
finest country to the best of nations — France." 



64 AS OTHERS SEE US 

not the slightest doubt. De Nevers thinks it rather 
odious to assume that the Almighty is especially and 
exclusively committed on the side of American pres- 
tige. Among his illustrations, he quotes our his- 
torian Bancroft, "The American democracy follows 
its ascending march, uniform, majestic as the -laws 
of being, sure of itself as the decrees of Eternity." 
[Anot her finds it extremely distasteful that the 
Americans, above all peoples, cannot leave home 
for another country without "carrying their whole 
national belongings with them." 

"From the moment they set foot on foreign soil, they begin 
to compare things with what they left behind them. This is 
intelligent and unavoidable, but the American is never at rest 
until he has made as many benighted 'foreigners' as possible 
understand and admit that their civilization and ways of life 
are inferior. Hotels, railways, checking baggage, the size of 
farms, the telephone, the methods of despatching business, — 
one and all have to be ' rubbed into you,' to use their vernacu- 
lar. Americans with any breeding, of course, do not do this, 
but it is the curse of the country that it has so vast an army 
constantly on the march that is never happy unless bragging 
about some superiority." * 

This opinion represents the settled conviction of 

* A well-known writer among our American women just returns 
from Europe with this appealing observation to her sisters during 
their stay abroad: "A little more repose, a little more appreciation 
of what is not American, a little more modesty about vaunting one's 
own in public, a little less criticism of other countries, a little 
more attention to the manner of expression and the timbre of 
voice — these are some of the things which would improve the 
American woman traveller, and yet leave her, as she should be, 
distinctly American." 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 65 

all our earlier critics and of some recent ones from 
whatever country they come. They find in this 
aggressive self-complacency the least tolerable of 
our qualities. About no other one trait is the una- 
nimity more complete. There would be some escape, 
if the charge were brought by this or that nationality 
from which we widely differed, or if it came from the 
over-critical and ill-disposed alone. It is the very 
gravity of the accusation, that it comes from those 
most friendly to us and from those who have studied 
us with most open minds. The early French writers 
were passionately on our side and against the 
aspersions of the English critics of America. Yet 
the most cordial of these are annoyed by the in- 
cessant exercise of this unhappy talent. None of 
the French brought a more generous and insistent 
sympathy than De Tocqueville. No one gave surer 
proofs of that sympathy than by the way in which 
he philosophizes upon and excuses crudities and 
annoyances necessarily incidental to travel and 
investigation seventy-five years ago in this country. 
Yet about our self-vaunting, he had this passage : — 

"For the last fifty years, no pains have been spared to con- 
vince the people of the United States that they are the only 
religious, enlightened, and free people. They perceive that, 
for the present, their own democratic institutions prosper, 
whilst those of other countries fail; hence they conceive a 
high opinion of their inferiority, and are not very remote from 
believing themselves to be a distinct species of mankind." '■ 

* "Democracy in America," Vol. I, p. 506. 

Another passage indicates a type which we hope was limited 

F 



66 AS OTHERS SEE US 

De Tocqueville's friend, the Academician Ampere, 
has far less insight, but through his long journey is 
so gallantly polite and so obstinately the gentleman 
in every mishap, that we quite fall in love with him. 
His good-will is exhaustless, but he suffers from 
hearing, day in and day out, that Europe is to be 
pitied for the lack of those perfections which blossom 
in the institutions and the character of Americans. 
"They are really very much hurt if you put these 
superiorities in question." 

Abdy, who was here in 1 833-1834, has many 
comments on this characteristic. He is led to 
examine our school books, giving from Hart's 
"Geographical Exercises" this sample: — 

"Knowing that Asia," says the author, "is sunk in igno- 
rance and gross superstition, the young reader will at once 
discover the cause of our moral superiority over the dull 
Asiatics, as well as the great mass of more enlightened neighbors 
of the European part of the Eastern continent. It need scarcely 
be repeated, that it is owing to the influence of the press shed- 
ding its rays of knowledge over the minds of a free people." ' 

and exceptional: "I have often remarked in the United States 
that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may 
be dispensed with; hints will not always suflBce to shake him off. 
I contradict an American at every word he says, to show him that 
his conversation bores me: I preserve a dogged silence, and he 
thinks I am meditating deeply on the truths which he is uttering; 
at last, I rush from his company, and he supposes that some urgent 
business hurries me elsewhere. This man will never understand 
that he wearies me to death, unless I tell him so, and the only way 
to get rid of him is to make him my enemy for life." — Vol. II, 
p. 210. 

* " Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States." 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 67 

Abdy has a theory that bragging is necessarily de- 
veloped by the shifts of the demagogue in a democ- 
racy and "the adulation of the press." He quotes 
from the speech of President Van Buren before the 
New York Convention as follows : — 

"It was the boast and the pride and the security of the 
American nation, that she had in her bosom a body of men 
who, for sobriety, integrity, industry, and patriotism, were 
vmequalled by the cultivators of the earth in any part of the 
known world; nay, more, — to compare them with men of 
similar pursuits in other countries, was to degrade them." 

This has its match in a quotation from Mrs. 
Trollope : ^ — 

"Mr. Everett, in a recent Fourth of July oration, speaks 
thus: 'We are authorized to assert that the era of our inde- 
pendence dates the establishment of the only perfect organiza- 
tion of government.' Again, 'Our government is in its theory 
perfect, and in its operation it is perfect also. Thus we have 
solved the great problem in human affairs.' " 

That we have not wholly recovered, is seen in a 
few lines from the reported speech recently given by 
one of our most honored governors. It was spoken 
in an Eastern State. 

"In the depth and breadth of character, in the volume of 
hope and ambition, in the universality of knowledge, in rever- 
ence for law and order, in the beauty and sanctity of our 
homes, in sobriety, in the respect for the rights of others, in 
recognition of the duties of citizenship, and in the ease and 
honor with which we tread the myriad paths leading from 
rank to rank in life, our people surpass all their fellow-men." 

1 p. 163. 



68 AS OTHERS SEE US 

When Mr. Bryce was at work upon his first edi- 
tion, he quoted the following passage from an address 
before a well-known literary association by one of 
our eminent citizens, who was speaking of the 
influence which the American principles of liberty, 
as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, 
were exciting in the world : — 

"They have given political freedom to America and France, 
unity and nationality to Germany and Italy, emancipated the 
Russian serf, relieved Prussia and Hungary from feudal ten- 
ures, and will in time free Great Britain and Ireland also." * 

Thus the entire planet is saved by a few strokes of 
an American pen. Mr. Bryce evidently thinks this 
extravagant, for he adds : — 

"I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their 
freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found 
them able to indicate a single point in which the individual 
man is worse off in England as regards either his private civil 
rights or his pohtical rights or his general liberty of doing and 
thinking as he pleases." 

I submit again that some of the above citations 
hold their own pretty evenly with the caricatures of 
Charles Dickens. If placed side by side and hon- 
estly compared, the reader will be much in doubt 
as to which is the burlesque. Most of these soaring 
eulogies are themselves caricatures. No such dizzy 
heights of cultural attainment have been yet 
reached by us. I was told that the final passage 

' "American Commonwealth," Vol. II, p. 635. 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 69 

quoted from the governor's speech received "en- 
thusiastic applause from the entire audience." ^ 

I have purposely omitted from this heart-searching 
the whole list of ill-tempered and grouty opinions 
from critics who too obviously did not like us. One 
of these says he came to stay a year, but had the 
misfortune to spend his first two weeks at the Chicago 
Exposition. On his first morning at the Fair, he 
hears an official say, "I guess this show will make 
them Europeans feel silly." *' Why silly? " asks the 
visitor. "You don't suppose they ever saw anything 
like this, do you?" When the unhappy stranger 
disagrees, he is assured by the official that it only 
proves that foreigners can't even tell a big thing 
when they see it. 

It was the habit of this observer to ask a great 
many questions, but he says he invariably got brag 
instead of information, until, unable to stand it 
further, he took a ticket for home, resolved never to 
set foot in this country again. This is petulance and 
need not much annoy us. Our wincing comes 
when wholly cordial and large-minded men like 
Richard Cobden have to speak of the "vulgar ex- 
pression of our self-sufficiency," or when a man of 

* There was a large gathering chiefly of leading business men, 
many of them university graduates. They were being gravely and 
unctuously assured that we "surpass all our fellow -men" — in 
what? In "sobriety," in "depth and breadth of character," "in 
the universality of knowledge," "in reverence for law and order," 
"in respect for the rights of others," "in recognition of the duties 
of citizenship," etc. This cosmic preeminence is not here measured 



70 AS OTHERS SEE US 

science full of gentle courtesies like Sir Charles 
Lyell turns aside from men and occasions in order 
to avoid "what one can stand now and then, but 
not everywhere and all the time," It is this type 
of man who often asks why we should have this 
ungracious habit. Why should it be so conspicuous ? 
Is it from a permanent disease of "congenital emi- 
nence"? Is it because the people of the United 
States began by accepting a theory of equality 
which they soon saw could not possibly be applied 
to actual life ? Emerson thought the lack of virtues 
could be detected in any man who loudly talked about 
them. Is it because at heart the inhabitants of the 
States really doubt their greatness that they so 
clamorously insist upon it? Is it because they 
themselves see such a gap between their formulated 
democratic ideals and their actual practices that 
they "put on an extra strut of self-assertion before 
strangers"? Another tries to find out "whether the 
Yankees brag among themselves as they do before 
strangers." He finds the evidence on this point very 
perplexing. On the one hand, he is assured that 
the natives have an inexhaustible delight in abusing 
their own country and its institutions, and will even 
entertain a foreigner with tales of political and other 
self-abasement beyond any pitch of defamation that 
the most bitter outsider ever conceived.^ Against 

by business and commercial tests, to which we have been much 
accustomed. It is measured by the very highest spiritual values 
that human beings attain in this world. 

* There is much truth in a remark of Mr. Bryce to the effect 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 71 

this he is told that Americans are bored bv this 
national habit more even than are strangers. Two 
*'men of distinction" (probably both from the East) 
tell him that as you travel West, the note of bragga- 
docio steadily rises until you reach the Pacific coast, 
where it would be deafening if your approach were 
not so gradual, as the big trees in the Yosemite 
are dwarfed because, on the route thither, you see 
so many larger and larger trees that the giant pines 
do not finally much surprise you. But this inquirer 
agrees that the "riot of self-flattery does culminate 
in the far West," its commonest form being that 
everything, from scenery to general culture, is the 
sublimest or the biggest in the universe. He notes 
down some forty objects or achievements that are 
indisputably ''the finest in the entire world." G. W. 
Steevens writes of his own discipline in these words : — 

*"I am now, Sir, about to show you my creamery. It is not 
yet finished, but when it is I anticipate that it will be the most 
complete and the best appointed,' — I shuddered, for I knew 
instinctively what was coming — 'in the world.' Shall I ever 
escape this tyranny of the biggest thing in the world?" ^ 

that, worse still than any bragging is the habit of an occasional 
American of finding delight before strangers in decrying his own 
country. 

1 " Land of the Dollar," p. 167. 

Professor Lamprecht recently writes, " Denver boasts of more 
buildings costing over $200,000 to erect than any other city of its 
age and size in America." After seeing so many largest and most 
imposing sublimities, he adds, "Ich habe sogar — the purest water 
in the world — getrunken." — "Americana," p. 68. 

Kipling, on his first journey, says he was told the Palmer 
House in Chicago was "the finest hotel in the finest city of God 
Almighty's earth." 



72 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Another amazed visitor, who admits the facts 
about our boastings, tries to defend us on the theory 
that a great deal of it is a form of American humor. 
He takes a passage from the novehst Marryat, who 
reports as follows : — 

"I was once talking with an American about Webster's 
dictionary and he observed, 'Well now, Sir, I understand it's 
the only one used in the Court of St. James by the king and 
princesses and that, by royal order.'" 

There is in this instance some inherent suggestion 
of whimsical indulgence on the part of this defender 
of the Yankee dictionary, but the well meant thesis 
that our vaunting is largely jocular has, alas, very 
scant truth in it.^ But the entire elimination of this 
element leaves a quite terrifying amount of strident 
vaporing still to account for. When Emerson said 
the American eagle was a good deal of a peacock, 
and Lowell, as ambassador, groans "that so many 
of my countrymen will allow the European to take 
nothing for granted about the greatness of America," 
they are both telling the truth. 

Nor can it be allowed to pass that this glorifying 
is in any way exclusive of the West. There just 
comes to hand an official document of the James- 
town Exposition from which, among many, I take 



* When some American deep-divers gave a public exhibition and 
one of them, before slipping into the water, called out, "We can 
dive deeper and stay under longer and come up drier than any 
divers in the world," the classification becomes easy. 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 73 

these sentences, "greatest military spectacle the 
world has ever seen," "grandest naval rendezvous 
in history," "greatest gathering of warships in the 
history of the world," "the largest military parade 
ground in the world," "the greatest military and 
naval parade ever witnessed," "the greatest display 
of gorgeous military uniform," and "the greatest 
military and naval celebration ever attempted in 
any age by any nation." This is an Eastern and not 
a Western product, and much more Atlantic rhetoric 
with the same resounding note could be reproduced. 
Foreigners both at the Chicago and the St. Louis 
Fairs, only on the edge of the West, found that " the 
world" standard was no longer adequate, so the 
"universe" had replaced it. On a very recent visit 
an English bishop was delighted with one of our 
less conspicuous Eastern colleges. He smilingly 
told its president that it was very restful to find a 
school that was not in endowment, in rapid growth, 
in distinction of alumni, or in some other way "the 
biggest in the country." The bishop reports that 
he noticed instantly the look of surprise and protest 
as his host replied, "But we do cover more space 
than any college in the United States." " From this 
time on," says the bishop, "I avoided all occasions 
of bringing this extraordinary endowment into play." 
In considering later (Chapter VI) the asserted 
supersensitiveness of the American people, a little 
light may be thrown on the origin of this self-mag- 
nifying by the reaction on national habits of that 



74 AS OTHERS SEE US 

long border life incident to the slow extension of 
our population toward the Pacific coast. It was a 
life in which the individual was so thrown upon his 
own resources, as to call out every extreme of self- 
assertion and independence. Successes were de- 
termined by his own conscious achievement rather 
than by social cooperation. Given several genera- 
tions in which this border life advances so rapidly 
and with such signal triumphs over the most re- 
doubtable external difficulties, and these extremes of 
self-confidence are not unnatural. It is not alone 
the duration of this border life with its reactions, 
but, even more, its rapidity and its sense of mastery 
and overcoming that have left so powerful an 
impress upon the mind and character.^ 

Yet the origins of the blemish are not nearly so 
important as the main fact that we have as a nation 
sorely overdone this business of calling attention to 
our eminence. I have tried on several occasions to 
trap a Japanese into some chance exercise of this 
gift. It has never met with the least success. At 
a small gathering in New York, at which four Japan- 
ese of distinction were present, an American officer 
asked if the Japanese would take Port Arthur. 
With the same modesty, amounting almost to self- 
effacement, in which he had spoken of the entire 

' An obvious comment on this theory is that we are by no means 
alone among nations in having a long "border life." If other 
peoples (as in Australia) had this experience without the excess of 
brag, the theory is inadequate. 



OUR TALENT FOR BRAGGING 75 

war, this reply came: "We do not know. The 
Russians fight with so much spirit and die so well ! 
but still we hope in a few months we shall get pos- 
session of it." Only in this tone could they be 
induced to speak of a single incident of their great 
struggle. 

Later a Japanese official was congratulated upon 
their great naval victory by one of our own admirals. 
"Yes," was the reply, "we think in Japan that our 
future tasks will be less difficult." ^ 

Remembering the degree of exultation which 
followed Manila and Santiago, what vocabulary 
would have served us had the Russian fleet gone to 
pieces before our own ships? If Dewey's fleet was 
so easily made to overtop Nelson at Trafalgar, what 
heroic fellowship would have been found worthy of 
an American Togo ! And yet whatever revelries 
of self-admiration we may still yield to under un- 
wonted excitement, nothing is clearer than the slow 
abatement of our boasting. More and more it has 
to be done with indirection and restraint. This 
toning down has come as we have grown more 
securely conscious of a national strength about 
which there is no question. The quoted bluster 
from political speeches in the first half of the last 
century would be far more likely to meet with derision 
before any average American audience at the present 

* De Amicis says for the Dutch that in all their towns he never 
heard a trace of national braggadocio — personne ne laisse percer 
I' ombre de vanite nationale. — " La Hollande," p. 95. 



76 AS OTHERS SEE US 

time. It was a part of the change which Dickens 
noted, even in the quarter of a century that separated 
his two visits to this country. 

There is truth in Bryce's words: "Fifty or even 
forty years ago, the conceit of this people was a 
byword. It was not only self-conscious but obtrusive 
and aggressive. . . . But American conceit has 
been steadily declining as the country has grown 
older, more aware of its strength, more respected 
by other countries." These are reassuring words. 
They are, moreover, true to the extent that we are 
more easily and quickly ashamed of bluster than we 
were in the days when we had plenty of shrewd sus- 
picion about our failings, but did not like to have 
them specified and posted by an outsider. In such 
improvement as there has been, let us rejoice, but 
not forget that the talent still requires a great deal 
of careful watching. 



CHAPTER V 

SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 

If there was an excess of emphasis in the last 
chapter upon a single alleged characteristic, it is 
because foreign comment on our boastfulness has 
itself such emphasis and unanimity. Upon no other 
one thing is there entire agreement. That we are 
sordid in our love of money is asserted by a majority 
of these onlookers, yet some of our ablest censors, 
as we shall see, now come gallantly to our defence 
against this charge. That our manners are pretty 
bad is very commonly said, but this, too, is denied 
by at least a few first-rate foreign judges. The 
variations in opinion are found about every peculiar- 
ity noted in this chapter. Some will have it that 
our democracy is full of envy; others, as Professor 
Miinsterberg, deny this. The "American voice" 
excites almost universal dislike, yet it has here and 
there a defender. But through the century, so far 
as I could learn, not a single voice is heard to defend 
us against the charge that our gift for bragging has 
no international competitor. 

Our frailties, queernesses, peculiarities, distinc- 
tions, make a rather portentous showing. To begin 

77 



78 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in lighter vein and with external characteristics, 
we can be spotted in any part of the world by the 
way our elbows rest upon the table. This trait vexed 
a French savant until he discovered our habit of 
eating corn from the cob. If for some exceptional 
reason this sign fail, we may be known by our manner 
of eating soup. We are the only people who fill 
the spoon by first moving it away from the body. 
This lacks something of the simplicity of the corn-on- 
the-cob theory.^ It also, as I have proved by in- 
vestigation, excites incredulity among many Ameri- 
cans who assert that since they could be trusted with 
soup, the spoon has been filled by moving it toward 
the body. The amount of gold displayed in the 
teeth is another safe token. As we have the best 
"fire brigades" because of the frequency of our fires, 
so we have the best dentists because our teeth are 
bad. A Frenchman hears that girls in the United 
States are often married with no other dowry than 
the gold "mined into their teeth." In any European 
crowd we may be known by our "inability to keep 
still" or by a "certain facial pallor." As we are 
studied in our own habitat, there is great "monotony " 
or "lack of variety" in our lives and ideals; rooted 
suspicion toward people and things we do not 
understand ; lack of thoroughness in our habits and 

* One budding naturalist among our visitors is delighted to 
find in Anthony Trollope an account of the American squash. It 
was often served to him, but he "had no conception of its origin." 
Now he learns that it is the "pulp of the pumpkin." 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 79 

undertakings; slight capacity for pleasure for its 
own sake; we are "very silent"; we are the most 
sensitive of peoples under criticism ; we are lawless, 
especially about everything that touches our business 
interests; we put up supinely with small injustices 
against which other nations kick. Especially the 
French endow us with a miraculous instinct for 
creating all forms of associational activity. M. de 
Tocqueville writes : * — 

"In no country in the world has the principle of associa- 
tion been more successfully used, or applied to a greater multi- 
tude of objects, than in America. Besides the permanent asso- 
ciations, which are established by law, under the names of 
townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are 
formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals." 

Chevalier says : — 

"The Yankee type exhibits little variety; all Yankees seem 
to be cast in the same mould ; it was, therefore, very easy for 
them to organize a system of liberty for themselves, that is, to 
construct a frame, within which they should have the necessary 
freedom of motion." 

Then, of his own French people he writes : — 

"As for us, who resemble each other in nothing, except in 
differing from everybody else." ^ 

* "Democracy in America," p. 242. 

Dr. A. S. Crapsey, for twenty-eight years active as a clergy- 
man in Rochester, N.Y., in speaking of "the hundreds of orders 
and associations" in that community, says, "They are so funda- 
mentally a part of our social life that our civilization would fall to 
pieces without them." 

^ Chevalier was a man of the world and a wise one, but these 
quoted words offer so genuine a bit of obtuseness and provincial- 



8o AS OTHERS SEE US 

These modern writers, from De Rousier and 
Professor Vigoroux to the last book of Paul Adam, 
continue to note this quality. M. Adam is so struck 
by it that he speaks of it as more peculiarly our dis- 
tinction than the aggressive individualism which most 
writers identify with our character and society. 

If our political and social pretensions as expressed 
in our Declaration and patriotic literature are seri- 
ous, we must be said to exhibit a most unexpected 
aptitude for snobbery. Both De Tocqueville and 
Laboulaye find amusement in the desire of Americans 
to have it known as soon as possible that they are 
probably descended from certain distinguished 
English families. On this point a great deal of 
embarrassing evidence is given from the behavior 
of many Americans in Europe, from the agility 
with which purchasable titles are clutched at in 
marriage, and from the amazing extension of so- 
cieties ready to furnish heraldic blazonry (for a 
consideration) to all comers.^ Harriet Martineau 

ism that they deserve comment. The Eastern traveller, Palgrave, 
says that practically the whole East in his time honestly thought 
all Europeans alike. They in the East were, of course, profoundly 
different one from another, but to the inhabitants of Bagdad or 
Mosool, there was not the slightest difference between a French- 
man, an Englishman, and a German, nor could they be made to 
understand the most obvious distinctions. Hamerton says that to 
the average Frenchman the English are pretty much alike. " Each 
nation is aware that there is now, and always has been in past 
times, an infinite variety of character within its own border, but it 
fails to imagine that a like variety can exist in a foreign country." 
' One spectator, scoffing at our pretence of equality, says, "The 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 8 1 

has much to say about snobbishness in the older 
cities. Boston was even more intolerable to her than 
it was to H. G. Wells. As she had taken our pre- 
tensions to equality seriously, she expresses her first 
surprise to find that the most interesting people are 
so sharply separated by social barriers. In Phila- 
delphia she makes inquiries about the cultivated 
superiorities, and is told "that the mutual ignorance 
was from fathers of the Arch Street ladies having 
made their fortunes, while the Chestnut Street 
ladies owed theirs to their grandfathers. Another, 
who was amused at a new fashion of curtseying 
just introduced, declared it was from the Arch Street 
ladies rising twice on their toes before curtseying, 
while the Chestnut Street ladies rose thrice. I was 
sure of only one thing in the matter, — that it was 
a pity that the parties should lose the pleasure of 
admiring each other, for no better reasons than 
these : and none better were apparent." ^ 

Among our "grands traits," De Nevers insists 
that a supercilious exclusiveness {V exclusivisme 
dedaigneux) is to be found. He says that between 
three and four thousand American families, with 
hungry credulity, have traced their ancestry to those 
who have occupied thrones somewhere in Europe. 
It is this writer who attributes to us a unique de- 
velopment of "altruistic vanity" which is un pro- 

Americans seem to have no notion that Nature went into the busi- 
ness before the Declaration of Independence." 
* "Society in America," Vol. I, p. 173. 



82 AS OTHERS SEE US 

duct dbsoluement Americain. This amiability is 
illustrated by the generous and free distribution of 
titles which encourage the "ambitions and the good 
nature of the community." It was Marryat, I 
think, who met "in the United States chiefly colonels 
and captains who had never been in any army, 
but owed their dignity to the good-will of their 
neighbors." The rebuke of Mr. Bryce is conveyed 
with such literary skill that one must italicize a part 
of it. He speaks of our "enthusiasm for anything 
that can be called genius with an over-readiness to 
discover it." 

Again, one of our primary passions is "to overdo 
things." If we take on any new habit, like the 
tipping of waiters and attendants, we are not content 
to exercise it with the least restraint. It must be 
carried into all forms of demoralizing excess. An 
Englishman is taken to one of the more fashionable 
New York clubs on several occasions. He says that 
his American hosts in no instance gave less than a 
dollar tip to the cabman.^ "What," he asks, "can 
you expect of a system that gives as a tip three 
times as much as my fare from the station to my 
club in London ever costs me?" 

' This seemed to me extravagant both as a tip and a story. 
I have, however, verified it. A gentleman frequently at one of 
these clubs tells me: "I have several times gone there to dine with 
two fellows whom no one would call rich. I have repeatedly seen a 
crisp dollar bill given as a tip. I supposed it was the fare, until 
I found out, in this instance, that the cabs were paid for at the 
club." 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES S$ 

Our "pitiless hospitality" is another phase of 
this "genius for overdoing." That the Yankees 
are tuft-hunters can be seen in "this inability to let 
any kind of celebrity alone a minute J'' They will 
drive him to death if they can get some glory out 
of it. Frederika Bremer has many complaints of 
this. She writes: "And that is the way they kill 
strangers in this country. They have no mercy on 
the poor lion, who must make a show and whisk his 
tail about as long as there is any life left in him. 
One must really be downright obstinate and stern, 
if one would be at peace here. And I feel as if I 
should become so. It is said that Spurzheim was 
regularly killed with kindness by the Bostonians." 

This "impulse to excess" has many dangerous 
illustrations. "When the passion has vented itself, 
interest dies out," as in our "prolific and insane 
passing of laws." "For every conceivable evil, 
real or imagined, the Yankee must have a law, but 
when it is passed, he goes about his business as if 
nothing more were required." The result being that 
"nowhere is there such a bewildering mass of unen- 
forced and forgotten laws as in America." 

Among civilized folk, we have the least agreeable 
speaking voice; we have a passion for exaggeration 
and bigness apart from quality and excellence. This 
latter shows itself not only externally (as in our 
advertising and our press methods) but in our 
tastes and habits of thought. 

Perhaps not unconnected with this is another 



84 AS OTHERS SEE US 

observation that is often expressed by foreign students 
about our educational institutions. It is admitted 
that we have specific schools of the highest rank in 
administrative efficiency, but that the visiting stu- 
dent is surprised by nothing so much as the larger 
number that have elaborate up-to-date external 
equipment and housing with feeble and ineffective 
teaching. An English educator, after seeing our 
schools during a five months' trip, says, "There are 
no better schools in the world than a few I could 
name, but in many others with imposing and costly 
plants, the teaching is so poor that your public 
appears to trust the magnificence of the plant rather 
than the capacity of the teachers." 

To continue our discipline, we have an extraordi- 
nary optimism, especially where there seems to be 
no justification for it; we are also "fatalists," ac- 
cepting grimly or cheerfully all sorts of defeats when 
once the issue is decided; we are "the only people 
to whom hotels and travelling are ends in them- 
selves." This is a part of our surplus (or morbid) 
energy and love of change, which excites many com- 
ments. Our curiosity is very highly developed ; 
we have little "love of locality." We have unusual 
powers of adaptability to new and sudden emergen- 
cies; we are "most intellectually tolerant," have 
"great good nature,"^ "unhmited push," "inven- 

' Sir Arthur Helps puts these words into the mouth of his 
lawyer, " I think you cannot help being struck by their good nature, 
even when they [the Americans] commence blowing their tiresome 
national trumpet." — "Essays on Organization," p. 208. 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 85 

tion," "energy," "versatility," and a widespread 
"whimsical humor." 

It is very painful to find that other nations do not 
think us the wittiest folk in the universe, but "a 
certain generally diffused humor" is readily granted 
to us. We are known, finally, by one other ugly 
distinction which gives us easy and sinister precedence 
among civilized folk of all the world. Side by side 
with lordly hospitalities for all the embodied en- 
lightenments, we show a mania to foster and sup- 
port multitudes of impostors. Mr. Muirhead's 
words were, "the home of the charlatan and the 
quack." Why, it is asked, should a people so priding 
itself on its practical good sense open its arms to 
every religious and medical charlatan on earth? 
One visitor tries to make a record of all the obvious 
quacks in a small city of twenty thousand. Palmists, 
clairvoyants, fortune-tellers, soothsayers, astrologers, 
innumerable healers, magicians, exorcists, he finds 
in such numbers that he is sure "the Americans 
don't know themselves what a pest of vampires and 
parasites they harbor." More dangerous than this 
swarm of necromancers, however, is the patent 
medicine fiend. Here our passion for humbug is 
exercised at terrible cost. This investigator gives 
up his task of counting the quacks, but says he now 
understands why we are "a headachy and dyspeptic 
people." "It is a nation of nervously disturbed 
people." A French engineer, four years in the 
West, thinks the Americans are not to be feared by 



86 AS OTHERS SEE US 

competing nations, because they will lose their pres- 
tige and strength through the quack doctor. 

De Nevers, also, connects our ill health with 
"the colossal use of drugs." 

One writer thinks the palmists and sorcerers 
generally are welcomed and maintained as we wel- 
come vaudeville or any source of fun. We get 
amusement enough out of them to justify the ex- 
pense, but are not really fooled by them. The 
quack doctor and patent medicine man are not thus 
accounted for. They are like a "permanent devas- 
tating plague." "Why should this most beschooled 
and newspapered nation in the world freely exhaust 
itself by fostering this army of leeches?" One 
gives a long list of advertisements of which the 
following is an illustration: — 

" Great Clairvoyant ! Mme. Stuart ; the seventh 

DAUGHTER OF THE SEVENTH DAUGHTER, haS read 

cards since ii years of age, — life revealed, past, 
present, future, — ladies or gents, soc." 

Here is the full and redoubtable catalogue of our 
peculiarities, both in terms of weakness and of 
strength, as gathered from this literary annotation 
on our institutions and behavior. It is a medley of 
vigors and incompletenesses, of many offences and 
some sturdy excellences. 

There are innumerable variations given to these 
supposed characteristics, but for the most part they 
analyze into the more general ones here given. 
Between several of these, as we have seen, any real 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 87 

distinction is difficult to maintain. For example, 
if there is a "fatalistic" quality in our character, 
it is not something inherently different and apart 
from our "indiscriminate optimism," or even from 
our "general good nature." If we are careless and 
indifferent about common social wrongs and griev- 
ances, this is not distinct from our "tolerance." 
"Adaptability" is a part of our "love of change." 
If we have "a passion for bigness," that becomes a 
general term for other minor shortcomings like our 
"lack of tact," our "importunate hospitality" and 
"lack of restraint." Some of these require no com- 
ment, as they are merely human and race frailties, not 
in the least peculiar to our geography. With only a 
portion, even of the truthful strictures, can we deal. 
But first : Toward the main charges, what attitude 
are we to take ? Shall we greedily accept the flatter- 
ing ascriptions, but bristle with testy denial at the 
unflattering ones? This would too easily justify 
our critics. Smugly to take the praise and show 
affront at the blame, would prove that one damaging 
criticism is true: that "the American cannot stand 
criticism"; that "unless you coddle him, he sulks 
and won't play." One writer in 1840, examining 
our prisons, says: "I found I could not criticise with 
the slightest freedom. Unless I had plenty of com- 
pliments, I could not even get the information I 
wanted. If I put it all on with a trowel, I could get 
any question answered." We shall see later what 
a mass of evidence there is on this point. The only 



88 AS OTHERS SEE US 

proof that we have outgrown this childishness must 
be in our present readiness to face the censure as 
gayly as the approbation. 

Another form of that early oversensitiveness is 
to boast fussily that we don't in the least care what 
foreigners think of us. This only adds stupidity to 
childishness. 

To be intellectually hospitable to these critics is 
not in the least to admit their infallibility. Much 
less does it admit that criticisms once true are still 
true. Some of them that were meant as a stigma 
or weakness are virtues in the making. "Yankee 
curiosity" has received much abuse, but it is one 
of the most hopeful signs of growing intelligence. 
Several of our more recent visitors express surprise 
that this prying curiosity of which they had read 
or heard so much is nowhere to be found except 
as an exceptional phenomenon. So, too, with the 
charge of ''suspicion." That we are exceptional 
in this has probably no shred of truth so far as it is 
meant to stand for a national characteristic. For- 
eigners far oftener note an extreme openness and 
frankness of mind which even become objects of 
criticism. Suspicion is a product of social or class 
conditions, or it is the merely human expression of 
timidities and doubts when inexperienced folk are 
placed in wholly new and unwonted surroundings. 
One of the critics explains that he never saw this 
suspicion in Americans in their own country, but 
observed it only when he saw them in Europe. 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 89 

Even such a count against us as that we are the 
"happy hunting-ground of all extant quackeries," 
that we "are the only nation of rank that fosters 
and protects all forms of charlatanism," raises an 
issue that is not to be dismissed as if it were a final 
judgment. 

There are specific forms of commercialized hum- 
bug that are definitely known to be such by the sim- 
plest tests and common experience. Against these 
no scathing can be too severe. But our critics in- 
clude in their condemnation far more than these. 
There is the assumption of some existing religious, 
educational, scientific, moral, or political standard, 
from which any departure is a depravity. Yet 
much of the world's new truth is constantly breaking 
in upon us through those that at the time are called 
cranks and impostors. What would become of 
religion, science, medicine, politics, art, and educa- 
tion, social reforms, if in each the strictly orthodox 
contingent were allowed to define and dispose of 
heresies; if to those various orthodoxies were given 
sole power to decide the activities and the destinies 
of those groping and experimenting on life's frontier ? 
There is none to whom the race has more cause for 
gratitude than the long list of those who were the 
erratic and ostracized of their day. The accusation 
against the English, that they suffer still because 
they cannot bear with eccentricity, is as late as John 
Stuart Mill. Tolerance has its dangers, but a 
straitened conventionalism has perils greater still. 



90 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Again, a French writer complains that we are cold 
and unresponsive. That is what the Latin race 
would ascribe to all northern races. De Amicis 
knew Holland well, and that is his criticism against 
the Dutch. That all northern peoples are more 
indifferent to pleasure for its own sake, is true from 
the Latin point of view. 

Still other of these traits are explained by the 
character of the period of development. They would 
be as true of other nations when the corresponding 
stage was reached. Given our facilities for constant 
travel, and they, too, will be "restless" and "in- 
cessantly on the go," and apparently have "slight 
attachment to the home." 

"Lack of thoroughness," in the sense meant, was 
inevitable and even justifiable in the early decades 
of the last century, when the criticism was oftenest 
made, Americans have, says one, "an absurd lack 
of thoroughness." It will be remembered that 
words like "absurd" and "ridiculous" are usually 
applied by us to objects and happenings, the real 
meaning or explanation of which we do not under- 
stand. The "absurdity" is properly in our ovm 
lack of comprehension. 

For example, our "flimsy wooden houses" have 
excited a great deal of emotional rhetoric. They 
were almost the first objects noted by Dickens. 
They seemed "to have no root." They looked 
as if they "could be taken up piecemeal like a child's 
toy," and crammed into a little box.* Another says 

' "American Notes," Vol. I, p. 23. 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 9 1 

they are "as absurd as they are dangerous and 
wasteful." A stately English scholar said while 
lecturing here: "Your wooden houses, I can't 
understand. Why don't you put up something in 
stone and brick that will be solid at the end of three 
hundred years, as we do in England?" An Ameri- 
can, to whom the question was put, answered: "It 
is because we don't want that kind of a house. 
Changes, improvements, new comforts of all sorts 
come so fast, that we don't want a house to last too 
long. This house is what I want, but not what my 
children will want. Even I want to make some 
structural change every ten years. I can now do 
it without being ruined, as I could not in one of 
your three-century dwellings." "Bless my heart," 
replied the Englishman, "I never thought of that. 
You want houses that will easily take on improve- 
ments as they come, and be free to build a new and 
better one every generation, if you want to." I 
heard the Englishman say later, as he was com- 
menting on the above conversation, "It is really 
extraordinary how stupid most of us are in not trying 
to discover why people do things in different ways, 
before we set up as judges." This bit of obvious 
wisdom applies quite as well to a good many of the 
"characteristics" which here occupy us. 

There are, however, some of these strictures that 
are not to be explained away or even to be interna- 
tionalized. Stretch the margin of exceptions widely 
as we may, the "American voice" in many parts of 



92 AS OTHERS SEE US 

the country and among a considerable portion of 
the population is so sadly deficient in resonance and 
pleasing quality that no ardor of patriotism can save 
our pride about it. That the great mass of us do 
not set ourselves — like the English, for example — ■ 
stoutly against recognized evils and nuisances of 
the commoner sort is incontestable. Herbert Spencer 
saw in this one of our chief weaknesses. It is again 
and again asked, Why should a people of such un- 
doubted vitality and assertion have this failing? 
Chevalier says: "They eat what is placed before 
them, without ever allowing themselves to make 
any remark about it. They stop at the pleasure of 
the driver and the captain, without showing the least 
symptom of impatience; they allow themselves to 
be overturned and their ribs to be broken by the one, 
without uttering a complaint or a reproach; the 
discipline is even more complete than in the camp." 

A British critic calls this "the little-understood 
stoicism of the Yankee" in contrast to which, he 
says that "if an Englishman finds his chop slightly 
burnt, he barks at everybody in sight." 

That Americans in the presence of great and 
impending evils show extraordinary mettle has often 
enough been said at home and abroad. Even the 
English found us sufficiently lively as kickers in 1776 
and 181 2, The sacrifices for an idea North and South 
in the Civil War mark the first profound change of 
tone in foreign criticism. John Bright could say, 
"A nation that can suffer like that for its principles 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 93 

has answered all critics that are capable of under- 
standing ideals." But these are the great events. 
It is conceded that these stir us to real unselfishness 
and intrepidity. The criticism concerns those lesser 
evils and injustices which continue to afflict most 
communities, and which Mr. Lowell thought likely 
to continue because of "the divine patience of 
my fellow-countrymen." The illustrations of this 
lethargy are troublesome from their very number. 

I choose three very simple instances from New 
England communities that are often spoken of as 
exceptional, so far as educational opportunity and 
general well-being are concerned. In the first one, 
serious political evils had developed during the last 
twenty years, largely in connection with carelessly 
bestowed franchises. From this root came treacher- 
ous pohtics and slovenliness in the care of the city 
streets and sanitation. After some ten years of 
this, I heard the following comment from the one 
citizen who, by common consent, was foremost in 
public spirit. He said, "No effort that we can 
make seems really to move the mass of our best 
citizens at all. Some of them will come to a meeting 
and talk manfully, but when it comes to giving their 
time and continuous work, even one evening in the 
week, they fall down. The college graduate as a 
class, and men from whom you would expect most, 
are about as good as so many deid men. They 
usually say they are too busy, but I find a large part 
of them using up four or five times as many hours 



94 AS OTHERS SEE US 

as this public service would require, at golf, at their 
clubs, or at the card table. Enough men play poker 
every day from four o'clock till dinner, to set these 
things right in six months." 

The second instance is a much-schooled com- 
munity in which harassing juvenile misdemeanors, 
among other things, have long been such a plague 
as to excite much discussion. The Captain of 
Police, who had special experience with these 
offenders, said in my hearing: "You needn't blame 
the kids ; the trouble is in the public, but especially 
in the educated and well-to-do people. There are 
just two in this town who have sand enough to take 
any real trouble after they make complaint. Those 
two will go to court and see it through, but the rest 
of the citizens just grumble, but can't be made to 
do anything about it." 

When these facts were brought out at a public 
meeting in the third town, a sociological professor 
made the reply: "We thought all the time you were 
talking about us. Several of our citizens have 
given up raising fruit and flowers, because there 
seems to be no way in which stealing and destruction 
can be prevented. One of my acquaintances cut 
down his fruit trees, although he never would take 
the trouble to appear in court against the offender, 
even when the petty thief had been caught. He 
gave as a reason that he always imagined a dis- 
tracted mother would appear and make such a fuss 
for her boy that he couldn't stand it." This pro- 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 95 

fessor enriched the discussion by adding that the 
reason why our domestic service is so bad is that 
almost all mistresses are too cowardly to tell the 
truth. When the servant leaves, and the mistress 
gives a "recommendation," she tells the most atro- 
cious fibs about the girl's real faults, and then ex- 
cuses herself on the ground that she "really can't 
hurt the girl's prospects." This coincides with one 
of Mrs. Bacon's conclusions about the servant ques- 
tion, that little is to be hoped for. "Until women 
can offer honesty in their written references, and 
supply full details to written questions, they have no 
right to complain of bad service from bureaus or 
employees." ^ 

It is this hesitation to face unpleasant facts 
rather than to be disagreeable and pugnacious about 
them, after the genius of our English cousins, that 
calls out the criticism. James Muirhead says, 
"Americans invented the slang word 'kicker,' 
but so far as I could see, their vocabulary is here 
miles ahead of their practice; they dream noble 
deeds, but do not do them ; Englishmen 'kick' much 
better, without having a name for it." ^ I have 
never found an American who denied this criticism 
after he had fairly considered it. One remembers 
little spurts of protest now and then. Indignant 
letters are sent to the press to complain of late 
trains, crowded trollies, or soft-coal smoke. Yet the 

^ American Magazine, February, 1907, p. 360. 
2 "The Land of Contrasts," p. 801. 



9^ AS OTHERS SEE US 

difference between our general acquiescence, and 
the English habit of quick and lusty resistance to 
minor evils, has no exaggeration in Herbert Spencer's 
comment. A humorous illustration of the English 
habit is shown me by Mr. Muirhead in the English 
"Who's Who" for 1904. Mr. Ashton gives, as one 
of his recreations, writing letters to the press on 
various subjects ; of these, over 550 call attention 
to neglect of graves of noteworthy people. 

In one of our smaller cities, the overchoked condi- 
tion of the street-cars called out a protest in the 
press. The local trolley magnate was incensed by 
this lack of consideration on the part of the public. 
He said the company couldn't do any better, adding, 
"The seats only pay our expenses: the straps give 
us our dividends.''^ As long as we submit to rank 
affronts of that character, we deserve what we get. 

For the degree of truth there is in the criticism, 
what reasons can be given? Is it a part of our 
"miscellaneous good nature" or of our " fatalism"? 
Is it that our "gift of tolerance," which Klein notes, 
includes things evil as well as good ? The extempo- 
rized reason is usually that we are "too busy with 
our own affairs." I have even heard it said that 
we have too much "humor" to be fussy about ordi- 
nary evils. A sociological teacher in one of our 
colleges states it thus: "The truth is, our individual 
relation to the whole pest of lesser injustices and 
evils is so slight and so indirect, that anything an 
individual can do strikes him as ridiculous. I am 




Captain Basil Hai.l 
Author of " Travels in North America ' 



SOME OTHER PECULIARITIES 97 

asked, for instance, to join the protestants against 
'city noises.' They are an infernal nuisance, but 
when I think of any conceivable thing I can do to 
check the nuisance, the incongruity makes me smile." 
That we do not like to make ourselves conspicuous 
or disagreeable accounts, I think, for more of this 
easy acquiescence than surplus of humor. 

It is not unlikely that one deeper reason why the 
English are blunt and abrupt about their rights, is 
because class lines are so much more sharply drawn 
there. Within these limits, one is likely to develop 
the habit of demanding his dues. He insists upon 
his prerogatives all the more because they are more 
narrowly defined. When an English writer ^ says, 
"We are not nearly so much afraid of one another in 
England as you are in the States," he expresses this 
truth. In a democracy every one at least hopes to 
get on and up. This ascent depends not upon the 
favor of a class, but upon the good- will of the whole. 
This social whole has to be conciliated. It must be 
conciliated in both directions — at the top and at the 
bottom. To make one's self conspicuous and dis- 
agreeable, is to arouse enmities that block one's way. 

This is in part what De Tocqueville means in one 
of his few severities, "I know of no country in which 
there is so little independence of mind and real 
freedom of discussion as in America." Professor 
Miinsterberg evidently thinks Germany has more 
"inner freedom"; and even adds, "If I consider 

1 Jowett, Book VIII, p. 588. 



98 AS OTHERS SEE US 

the outer forms of life, I do not hesitate to maintain 
that Germany is even in that respect freer than the 
United States." ^ An honored citizen of Maine has 
given it as the worst feature of their constitutional 
prohibition that "it paralyzes the intellectual inde- 
pendence of our politicians." He named three men 
prominent as statesmen. "I know personally that 
every one of them heartily disbelieves in that liquor 
legislation, but they will not imperil their careers 
by saying so in public." That this "saving sub- 
serviency" will be found in every nation of the 
world is, of course, true. That it is more necessarily 
prevalent in a large and loose democracy is what 
these criticisms imply. 

As other of these imputed characteristics are to 
have further consideration under topics which they 
serve to illustrate, the next chapter will be devoted 
to a peculiarity that is a kind of tap-root from which 
others spring; namely, the extreme sensitiveness of 
the American people under criticism. 

* "American Traits," p. ^S- 



CHAPTER VI 

AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS 

One of our critics reports that he meant to make 
a third trip to the United States, but that he suffered 
so much from the perpetual inquiry, "How do you 
Hke America?" "How do you hke our city or 
town?" that he concluded to stay at home. 

The fame of Frederika Bremer gave her universal 
welcome among us in the middle of the last century. 
Her two volumes ^ are full of appreciation, but she 
is "vexed to distraction" by insistent personal ques- 
tioning, of which this is one example : — 

"At the hotel at Buffalo I was again tormented by some 
new acquaintance with the old, tiresome questions, 'How do 
you Hke America?' 'How do you Hke the States?' 'Does 
Buffalo look according to your expectations?' To which 
latter question I replied that I had not expected anything 
from Buffalo." ^ 

This plague of questioning assumed many forms 
and became a sore trial to her. She thought as she 
went South she might be free from it. But there, 
too, it haunted her. 

' "Homes of the New World," two volumes, Harpers, 1853. 
' "Homes of the New World," Vol. I, p. 596. 
99 



lOO AS OTHERS SEE US 

"You are asked, for example, — 

'Will you have butter?' 

'Yes, I thank you.' 

'Will you take fish or meat? chicken or turkey?' 

'Chicken, if you please.' 

'Have you any choice? The breast or a wing?' 

Then comes, 'Will you have pickles?' 

'No, I thank you.' 

A pause and calm ensues for two minutes. But then 
somebody to your left discovers that you have no pickles, and 
pickles come to you from the left. 'May I help you to 
pickles ? ' 

'No, I thank you.' 

After a few minutes more somebody on the right sees 
that you have no pickles, and hastens to offer you the bottle. 
'Will you not take pickles?' 

You then begin an interesting conversation with your next 
neighbor; and, just as you are about to ask some question of 
importance, a person opposite you observes that you are not 
eating pickles, and the pickle-bottle comes to you across the 
table." ' 

If we are to believe several other visiting celebrities, 
the question, "How do you like us?" begins before 
landing, never fails at the dock, and continues until 
the poor victim is under shelter in his native land. 
If the traveller has a turn for philosophizing, he is 
sure to ask why the American has this itching desire 
to know what every foreigner thinks about his town 
or country. One maintains that "famiharity with 
half the world" never elicited this inquiry in any 
other country. An American who had spent much 

• "Homes of the New World," Vol. I, p. 334. 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS lOI 

of his life in Europe told me he never remembered 
once being asked, " How do you like Italy, or Eng- 
land, or Germany ? " Bryce says in his Introduction, 
"In England one does not inquire from foreigners, 
nor even from Americans, their views on the English 
laws and government ; nor does the Englishman on 
the continent fmd Frenchmen or Germans or Italians 
anxious to have his judgment on their politics." 
G.W. Steevens^ thinks that while personally we are 
"entirely free from self-consciousness," our national 
self-consciousness is extreme in its development. 
We are "uneasy unless we know what the observer 
is thinking." Buckminster notes in 1838^ that 
"the first citizen of Pennsylvania, Nicholas Biddle," 
in an address delivered at Princeton College, used 
these words, "When some unhappy traveller ven- 
tures to smile at follies which we do not see or dare 
not acknowledge, instead of disregarding it or being 
amused by it, we resent it as an indignity to our 
sovereign perfections." This differs little from 
Mrs. Trollope: — 

"If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a 
fine one, 'Ay,' he replies, 'there is not its equal in the world.' 
If I applaud the' freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, he an- 
swers, 'Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy 
to enjoy it.' If I remark the purity of morals which dis- 
tinguishes the United States, 'I can imagine,' he says, 'that 
a stranger who has witnessed the corruption that prevails in 
other nations, should be astonished at the difi'erence.' At 

* "Land of the Dollar," p. 315. 

' "Travels in America," Vol. II, p. 45. 



I02 AS OTHERS SEE US 

length, I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he 
returns to the charge, and does not desist till he has got me 
to repeat all I have just been saying. It is impossible to con- 
ceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it 
wearies even those who are disposed to respect it." ' 

Alfred Bunn, an English lecturer, writes : ^ — 

"Such an unhappily sensitive community surely never ex- 
isted in the world ; and the vengeance with which they visit 
people for saying they don't admire or like them, would be 
really terrible if the said people were but as mortally afraid 
of abuse as they seemed to be. I would not advise either Mrs. 
Trollope, Basil Hall, or Captain Hamilton, ever to set their 
feet upon this ground again, unless they are ambitious of 
being stoned to death." 

M. de Tocqueville says : ^ — 

"Nothing is more embarrassing, in the ordinary intercourse 
of hfe, than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A 
stranger may be well inclined to praise many of the institutions 
of their country, but he begs permission to blame some things 
in it, — a permission which is inexorably refused." 

It is a different phase of this same feeling to which 
Mr. Howells refers when he asks why it is that we 
Americans insist, when abroad, in being appreciated 
"in the lump." Why must the poor alien show a 
fondness for the whole nation? This is a form of 
sublimated patriotism which we do not practise at 
home. We do not ourselves like Americans "in 
the lump." After our tastes and sympathies we 

^ Vol. II, p. 275. 

^ "Old England and New England," 1853, pp. 190-191. 

' " Democracy in America," p. 311. 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS 103 

have affections and likings for individuals. We do 
not dote on the totals in the census. 

A lecturer, recently here from Cambridge, Eng- 
land, said of this characteristic: "We Englishmen 
don't care a rap whether England is liked or disliked 
as a nation. We like some human beings here and 
there. Some Americans quite win our hearts, just 
as some Englishmen do. But I won't love the whole 
of America any more than I love the whole pack of 
my own countrymen." This is clearly what we all 
act upon in our ordinary relations. In spite of 
"Triple" or any other alliances, no nation loves 
another nation, no race loves another race. Can we 
even say that the South loves the North, or the North 
the South? Does the East love the West, or the 
West the East? Does Chicago love St. Louis, 
Cleveland grow foolish over Cincinnati? Why, 
then, should America be so supersensitive on this 
point? Why should Paul Bourget still have to put 
it into his French text that we are so "touchy" — 
au plus haul degre "touchy"? * 

Though the French and Germans note this trait, 
such natural history of our sensitiveness as can be 
traced has far more to do with our Mother Country 
than with that of any other or all others. In spite 
of vehement denial, we cared about English opinion. 
The historical relation with England, which covers 
the origin and close of two wars (1776 and 181 2), 
did not wholly create this touchiness, but it helps 
1 "Outre-Mer," Vol. I, p. 68. 



I04 AS OTHERS SEE US 

much to explain it. It is altogether impossible at 
this date to reproduce the enduring bitterness toward 
England which her attitude in these conflicts pro- 
duced upon the American people. Almost more 
than the wars themselves was the prevailing tone 
of her official dealing with us, as well as the more 
general criticism seen in the last chapter. De 
Tocqueville, a quarter of a century after the War of 
1812, says that it is incredible to what length this 
hatred of England went. 

It is to the popular reading habit that we must first 
look. Dickens finds every American with his heels 
in the air and a newspaper in his hands. What 
sort of message did these readers find reprinted for 
them from the last batch of English papers ? It was 
oftener than not coarse abuse of this country. Or 
it was a half-insolent ignoring of every national 
aspiration, and this was more galling still. It is a 
loyal Englishman who speaks of his own country- 
men in these words : ^ — 

" But it is just his calm, superciHous Philistinism, 
aggravated no doubt by his many years' experience 
as a ruler of submissive Orientals, that makes 
-it no less a pleasure than a duty for a free and 
inteUigent republican to resent and defy his criti- 
cism." 

Until the forties, English opinion had been chiefly 
formed by books like those of Basil Hall, Hamilton, 
Dickens, and Mrs. Trollope. Books, still more 

' "The Land of Contrasts." 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS 1 05 

recklessly hostile, like those of Parkinson and Smyth, 
were widely read by their countrymen. For years 
it was honestly believed in this country that vilifiers 
were hired by the British Ministers to discredit the 
United States. It was, of course, not true, but that 
it could have general belief indicates the state of 
feeling. It was also among our honest beliefs that 
many of these critics were here to gather discourag- 
ing evidence that might prevent English laborers 
from coming to this country.^ This angered a certain 
class of employers who wanted cheap labor. That 
it was the adopted English policy to empty her 
poorhouses, orphan and insane asylums of their 
inmates and ship them to our shores, was also the 
commonest belief, and a belief that had plenty of 
apparently good evidence to sustain it. Indignant 
public meetings were held, with many investigations 
and lurid reports. 

A fair sample of these reports was sent to the 
General Assembly in Baltimore (183 1) by the mayor 
and city council. The report contained these words : 
"Of one thousand one hundred and sixty persons 
admitted to the almshouse in that city in 183 1, four 
hundred and eighty-seven were foreigners; and of 
this number two hundred and eighty-one had been 

^ The son of Napoleon's general, Achille Murat, believed this, 
for he wrote in his "Moral and Political Sketch of the United 
States," in 1827, that the English Minister, wishing to stop emigra- 
tion to the United States, descended so far as to induce mercenary 
writers to travel and promulgate through the press false statements 
against our people and Government. 



Io6 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in the country less than six months prior to their 
admission, and one hundred and twenty-one less 
than one week." 

To recount these various sources of antipathy, 
jealousy, and misunderstanding explains much of 
our excessive self-consciousness under English criti- 
cism. I have heard the story of a sturdy-minded 
sea-captain on Cape Cod, whose boy brought word 
from school that an English grammar must be pur- 
chased. The old man, who lived through the period of 
1812, shouted: " An English grammar ! I wouldn't 
have the thing in the house. You will buy an 
American grammar!" January 17, 1808, in a 
despatch to Canning, the English Minister in this 
country mentioned that Congress contained one 
tailor, one weaver, six or seven tavern-keepers, four 
notorious swindlers, one butcher, one grazier, one 
curer of hams, and several schoolmasters and Baptist 
preachers. The tone of this was understood to be 
one of ill-concealed contempt. We have only to 
imagine amiabilities like this, copied in half the 
press of the United States, to understand what lively 
response would follow. 

Into the American press came a steady stream of 
such quotations from English opinions. They were 
patronizing, contemptuous, or insulting, according 
to the humor of the writer. For more than a genera- 
tion this was the food on which the American reader 
fed ; De Tocqueville's word " incredible," as applied 
to these angers, is none too strong. 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS 107 

It is into this atmosphere that the English critic 
came. Nor is there much change until the nineteenth 
century is half spent. It was an atmosphere that 
heightened every one of our faults. It quite accounts 
for our early "suspicion." It throws a good deal of 
light on our bragging habits. The English traveller 
then seemed to us the embodied denial of every demo- 
cratic ideal that we cherished. To assert ourselves 
against this chilling influence was too human to be 
avoided. In June, 1837, Jared Sparks wrote De 
Tocqueville that he was "vexed and mortified that 
an edition of your ' Democratic ' has not yet been 
published in America." Our newspapers had be- 
gun to copy extracts from English reviews which 
naturally emphasized De Tocqueville's more critical 
remarks. Mild as these were, they were enough to 
create an instant prejudice against the book in the 
United States. 

That a good deal of this criticism was true, did 
not sweeten it to the taste. We had boldly and very 
conspicuously set up imposing ideals of political 
and social equality. Without the least restraint, we 
had raised these ideals before the world and made 
them the object of lofty and continuous declamation. 
It was therefore very rasping to have the ideals 
challenged. A yet sharper sting was in the frequent 
inquiry, "If you have a land of equality before the 
law, why do you continue slavery?" To the North- 
erner this passed endurance, and he usually makes a 
very poor figure in his attempts to show that slavery 



Io8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

doesn't really conflict with these sacred phrases 
about liberty. One enraged Yankee replies that 
only a blockhead could see any inconsistency be- 
tween slavery and liberty, and "besides, it's only 
down South, anyhow." An Englishman walking 
with his American host in New York, in 1825, sees 
the announcement of a dance on a placard bearing 
the words, "No colored people admitted." The 
guest says he remarked innocently, "It's pretty hard 
to practise equality, isn't it?" Whereupon his 
entertainer lost temper and said, "The Europeans 
are so spoiled by flunkeyism that they can't under- 
stand liberty when they see it." 

Our treatment of the Indians also gave rise to 
many tart passages, as did our rancor and inhuman- 
ity against the Catholics which culminated in the 
burning of the nunnery in Charlestown. 

There were indeed, at most periods when our 
visitors were present, some troublesome illustrations 
that seemed to give the lie to our fine speaking and 
writing. That Harriet Martineau, for instance, 
should come into Boston on the very day when 
Garrison was being dragged through the streets 
was awkward enough. She had given great atten- 
tion before her comingito our political history and 
development. What interested her from the first 
was the Theory and Practice in our life and 
institutions. Here was her first rude shock. In 
this "land of the free" was liberty of speech so 
brutally denied? If men were thus assaulted, was 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS 1 09 

there no law? It was an eminent college president 
who tried to soothe her in her disappointment. 
He insisted that " it was all right, — the mob having 
been entirely composed of gentlemen.'* Lawyers tell 
her that nothing can be done about it. "Ladies 
were sure that the gentlemen of Boston would do 
nothing improper." "Merchants thought the aboli- 
tionists were served quite right." "What would 
become of trade if such agitators were allowed to 
anger the South?" "Clergymen excuse themselves 
because the whole subject is so 'low.'" She writes 
further, "And even Judge Story, when I asked him 
whether there was not a public prosecutor who might 
prosecute for the assault on Garrison, if the aboli- 
tionists did not, replied that he had given his advice 
(which had been formally asked) against any notice 
whatever being taken of the outrage, — the feeling 
being so strong against the discussion of slavery and 
the rioters being so respectable in the city." ^ 

Here was the rough awakening to this noble 
woman. As one sees in Mrs. Chapman's Memoirs, 
Miss Martineau was capable of commanding moral 
courage.^ She had every hospitality that Boston 
and Cambridge could offer, but she did not flinch 
from criticising these open affronts upon liberty, 
law, and order. That the highest social and edu- 
cational respectability should lead in these attacks 
added gall to her pen. Her plain speaking stung 

* "Autobiography," Vol. II, p. 24. 
^ "Autobiography," Vol. II, p. 30. 



no AS OTHERS SEE US 

Boston to the quick. It at once became the habit to 
belittle her book and abuse her personally. When 
Captain Marryat came, he found her referred to as 
" that deaf old woman with the trumpet." He was 
assured that " her volumes were full of blunders ; that 
her entertainers really had great fun in telling her big 
stories which were solemnly written down." One 
eminent individual brings Miss Martineau's book 
to Marryat, who says that he was "excessively de- 
lighted when he pointed out to me two pages of 
fallacies, which he had told her with a grave face 
and which she had duly recorded and printed." ^ 

It was in this spirit that the injured self-love of the 
community took its revenge. It was very human, 
but rather petty and ignoble. There are errors in 
Miss Martineau's book and too much dogmatism. 
But at that time not two books had been written 
on the United States so full of truth, so enriched 
by careful observation and stated with more so- 
briety.^ 

I enlarge upon this special experience because it 
faithfully represents that of many other visitors. 

* "Diary in America," 1839, p. 9. 

' That a college with religious traditions like those of Welles- 
ley should honor itself, as it honors Miss Martineau, by giving her 
statue so conspicuous a place in that institution, is the happiest sign 
of enlarging intellectual life. There are those living who remem- 
ber her well and the obloquy that was heaped upon her. She was 
an object of " moral vituperation." She was a "coarse infidel " and 
even a "hardened atheist." She was a "trifler with truth and all 
sacred things" who "could not even write a single page vdthout 
several misstatements." 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS III 

We had called so much attention to our political 
and social principles, had so emphasized their 
superiorities, and, at the same time, had taken such 
mocking liberties with the corresponding ideals 
among our effete neighbors in Europe that we laid 
ourselves bare to every shaft of the enemy. Were 
we actually realizing these ideals of liberty, justice, 
and equahty with a success that justified our tone? 
Were our manners, morals, and social virtues, as 
set forth by the "cannon oratory" of July Fourth 
or by the politicians asking for votes, quite up to 
the representations ? We had ourselves some search- 
ing doubts on this point. No one probably knew 
better than we that there was a great deal of bun- 
combe in these pretensions. It was this uneasy 
consciousness of the gap between our proclaimed 
ideals and our observed social and political practices 
that created and maintained a great part of our 
" supersensitiveness " as a people. This condition 
was also a kind of hothouse in which our spirit of 
boasting reached its luxuriant growths. Both the 
sensitiveness and the bragging have diminished, 
partly at least, because we have been disciplined into 
a little humility. With many triumphs have come 
some sobering defeats. We have learned to look at 
our whole community life with fewer illusions. The 
Civil War, with its long aftermath of paralyzing 
difficulties, was the first awakening. That event, 
with the imavoidable blundering that followed far 
into the seventies, taught us the delicate complexity 



112 AS OTHERS SEE US 

of our political traditions; taught us slowly that 
conflictinsj views on the most fundamental issues 
could be honestly held, and that multitudes would 
die as bravely as ever men died to maintain those 
views. From the hard experience of that quarter 
of a century, both North and South learned im- 
measurably through the unlearning of prejudices. 
The South had to learn the meaning of nationality. 
It had to learn all that is meant by a reorganized 
industrial life with its necessary readjustments to 
the country as a whole. The North had surely no 
less to learn and to unlearn. Tardily she came to 
recognize that the struggle in the Southland was not 
solely to save slave property. That quite apart from 
this, there was an idealism which all fair men now 
honor and history will respect. After the war, the 
North had to learn within what narrow limits force 
is a remedy, just as she had to learn that the South 
must be governed by what is best in the South, and 
as for all that is implied in the "negro question," 
the North had to learn its main lesson as a child has 
to learn its alphabet. The intellectual and moral 
adjustment to the whole legacy of war problems has 
steadied and disciplined us as a nation. 

Not wholly separated from the teaching of this 
inheritance is the educational effect upon us of dif- 
ficulties that seem inherent between the Federal 
Government and the several States. It is not alone 
the murdered Italians in New Orleans and the 
confessed helplessness of the Government to enforce 




Captain Marrvat 
English Novelist and Critic of American Institutions 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS II3 

justice or the reverberations from California over 
the Japanese in public schools ; it is a whole nest of 
practical industrial and social problems that are 
seen to be grave because of our political structure. 
Sobering, too, are our immigration and Philippine 
problems with all that we are coming to associate 
with those heavy responsibilities. 

These collective experiences have done much to 
show most thoughtful Americans that our deeper 
problems are not solved solely because of our form 
of government. Neither universal suffrage nor 
popular education has worked half the wonders that 
were expected of them. Better still, we are learning 
how futile a thing is the mere legislative act, unless 
the will of a dedicated citizenship lives in the enact- 
ment. In not one of these ideals has the light of 
our faith gone out, but a certain levity and brisk- 
ness in our optimism has been subdued. It is no 
longer a fatality that works independent of our 
own acts. 

We were reproved some years ago by a French 
guest for lacking "objectivity." In this academic 
dialect, he wished to inform us that we were 
sentimental about ourselves; too self-centred and 
without much capacity to see and criticise ourselves, 
as other people see us and criticise us. This, too, 
was doubtless true, but it is surely a little less true 
in the later years. 

It is not a generation since Matthew Arnold wrote 
of the "American rhapsody of self-praise." In the 



114 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"elevated," the "beautiful," and the "interesting," 
he found our civilization in the United States lacking. 
He thought this lack unavoidable and natural, but 
saw it as an evil sign that we were sensitive and 
petulant when so obvious a truth about us was set 
down by the foreigner. 

He said if we would only be frank about these 
shortcomings, and acknowledge that the rule of " the 
average man is a danger," no fair observer would 
jfind fault. "Even if a number of leading lights 
amongst them said," he continues, " Under the cir- 
cumstances our civilization could not well have been 
expected to begin differently. What you see are 
beginnings : they are crude, they are too predomi- 
nantly material, they omit much, leave much to be 
desired — but they could not have been otherwise. 
They have been inevitable, and we will rise above 
them ; if the Americans frankly said this, one would 
not have a word to bring against them." * 

The test which this passage submits, we may 
accept without the slightest misgiving. The rare 
distinctions of beauty, elevation, and the "interest- 
ing" were lacking in our civilization. They are 
still unachieved, but many more than "some leading 
spirits" now know this limitation and acknowledge 
it. The last quarter of a century has produced a 
literature of self-criticism and self-accusation that 
fully meets Arnold's test. Bryce's first visit was a 
few years after the war. He was here again in 1883. 

^ "Civilization in the United States," pp. 9, 182. 



AMERICAN SENSITIVENESS 115 

He says that between those dates the oversensitive- 
ness "had sensibly diminished." In 1905 he could 
say more strongly still that the early bounds to our 
optimism have become "very different from self- 
righteousness or vainglory." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS CRITIC 

If it is true that no quarrel may take on more 
virulence than that within one's own family, the 
fact accounts for the extreme rancor of feeling against 
England that continued a generation after the War 
of 1812. I do not see in the evidence a sign that 
England "hated the United States," as was so often 
said. Until after the Civil War we were not thought 
important enough to inspire that feeling. She had 
merely an unintelligent contempt for us. This 
led her to ignore or to trample on every sensitive 
nerve in the national body. Sir George Otto 
Trevelyan, who justifies our Revolution of '76 in 
three volumes with an extreme of gallantry that 
excites some astonishment, uses a truer word to 
characterize the English feeling — "antipathy." He 
says that the uniform picture of our character was 
"daubed in colors which resembled the original as 
little as they matched each other." The men of 
Massachusetts were said to be "sly and turbulent, 
puritans and scoundrels, pugnacious ruffians and 
arrant cowards." That was the constant theme of 
the newspapers and the favorite topic of those 
officers of the army of occupation whose letters had 

116 



THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS CRITIC II7 

gone the round of London clubs and English country 
houses. "The archives of the Secretary of State 
were full of trite calumnies and foolish prophecies." ^ 
It was the worse because, he says, the governing 
classes had the least understanding of us. They 
represented the Americans as a "tumultuous rabble 
meddling with affairs of state which they were 
unable to understand." ^ 

The touch of Matthew Arnold is perhaps just as 
true when he says : — 

"The British rule which they threw off was not one of 
oppressors and tyrants which declaimers suppose, and the 
merit of the Americans was not that of oppressed men rising 
against tyrants, but rather of sensible young people getting 
rid of stupid and overweening guardians who misunderstood 
and mismanaged them." ^ 

It was this "stupid and overweening" mismanage- 
ment and misunderstanding of national feeling in 
the United States that was England's real fault. 
On our side there was plenty of rancor and plain 
hatred. The evidence has to be supplemented by 
the "national sensitiveness," with which the last 
chapter dealt, before it is quite possible to appreciate 
the malignity which early English criticism stirred 
in this country. It would be ill-advised to call up 
these chattering ghosts, if both nations had not now 
grown sensible enough and strong enough to join 

* "The American Revolution," Part I, p. 176. 

2 Ibid., p. 178. 

' "Civilization in the United States," p. 116. 



Il8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in the laugh against those musty and heavy-witted 
animosities. If England exhibited an incredible 
lack of tact as to everything which concerned popular 
feeling in this country, we too were often overfussy 
and childish about our prerogatives. Under the 
subject of American supersensitiveness, we have 
seen how the newspaper habit among our people 
brought a steady down-pour of galling criticism from 
British sources. Nothing corresponding to this was 
happening in England, for ordinary folk. 

A small part of the cultivated classes in England 
read the books written by their travellers.^ In the 
great reviews, men of letters like Sydney Smith and 
Gifford were using this collected material to put us 
on the rack. The lengths to which these leaders of 
English opinion went will be believed by no one who 
does not look at the record. The Edinburgh Quar- 
terly, Blackwood, and the British Review were all 
in it, as if there were a conspiracy to make the 
United States an object of common obloquy. It 
was believed in this country that the Poet Laureate 
Southey wrote one of the most contemptuous of 
these articles. The great Wordsworth penned lines 
like the following : — 

"All who revere the memory of Penn 
Grieve for the land on whose wild woods his name 
Was fondly grafted with a virtuous aim, 

* Chevalier says, "Almost all English travellers in this country 
have seen a great deal that was bad and scarcely anything that is 
good." — p. io6. 



THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS CRITIC HQ 

Renounced, abandoned, by degenerate men, 

For state-dishonor black as ever came 

To upper air from Mammon's loathsome den." 

Again he puts into his gentle cadence such opinions 
about our society as this : — 

"Big passions strutting on a petty stage 
Which a detached spectator may regard 
Not unamused. But ridicule demands 
Quick change of objects; and to laugh alone 
In the very centre of the crowd 
To keep the secret of a poignant scorn," etc. 

This venerable seer did not get his "poignant 
scorn" from local observation, but wholly from 
what English books and travellers had told him. 

We had our own sins in this tradition of ill-will. 
We cannot omit minor irritants like the scandalous 
behavior of some of our states in the; non-payment 
of their debts. It was this which gave venom to the 
slurs of Sydney Smith and the poet Wordsworth.* 
It was this which rankled in the minds of hundreds 
of English investors, and was so savagely reflected 
in at least ten years of this criticism. Nothing more 
nettled Americans than the English habit of scourg- 
ing the entire country for the sins of exceptional 
states. To include Massachusetts, with her honor- 
able record, in the same category with the shame 
of Mississippi seemed to inhabitants of the state 
which paid its debt an outrage on the country as 
a whole. 

1 See Sonnets VIII and IX, Vol. IV, " Poetical Works," Bos- 
ton, 1864. 



I20 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Neither can the natural wrath of the English over 
our long pirating of their books go unmentioned. 
The historian Sparks had a correspondence with De 
Tocqueville about the delays and difficulties in getting 
his book published in this country. He finds it 
unpleasant to explain why the author could expect 
no money from the publisher. An English author 
refuses to set foot in this country because of this 
"organized national thieving." Kipling reveals this 
feeling in the following : — 

"Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee schoolmarm, 
the cider, and the salt codfish of the Eastern States are re- 
sponsible for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. 
They stole books from across the water without paying for 
'em, and the snort of delight was fixed in their nostrils forever 
by a just Providence. That is why they talk a foreign tongue 
to-day." ^ 

These incidental raspings do not, however, account 
for the main trouble. 

As early as 1814 the Quarterly Review began this 
"crusade of vituperation." We were depicted as a 
people devoid of every common decency. We had 
neither religion, manners, nor morals. The replies 
of Timothy Dwight and J. K. Paulding published in 
New York, 181 5, stimulated counter attacks in 
later English reviews. 

We did not like being told that our ships could 
not fight; that the ''^Frolic surrendered without 
firing a shot"; that we were "the most vain, ego- 

^ "American Notes," p. 20, Boston, 1899. 



THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS CRITIC 121 

tistical, insolent, rodomontade sort of people that 
are anywhere to be found"; that "the supreme 
felicity of a true-born American is inaction of body 
and inactivity of mind." We were "techy," "way- 
ward," and "abandoned to bad nurses," and, like 
spoiled children, "educated to low habits," The 
Quarterly Review printed pleasantries like these. 
Franklin was idolized among us for gifts that are 
thus characterized in that Review : — 

"Franklin, in grinding his electrical machine and flying his 
kite, did certainly elicit some useful discoveries in a branch of 
science that had not much engaged the attention of the philoso- 
phers of Europe. But the foundation of FrankHn's knowledge 
was laid not in America, but in London. Besides, half of 
what he wrote was stolen from others, and the greater part of 
the rest was not worth preserving." ' 

We were "too proud to learn and too ignorant to 
teach, and having established by act of Congress 
that they are already the most enlightened people 
in the world, they bid fair to retain their barbarism 
from mere regard to consistency." This insolent . 
ribaldry is not from the pens of hungry journalists. 
It is the expressed conviction of literary and socially 
distinguished men. It continued pretty steadily for 
a generation. Here are a few titbits from the 
Foreign Quarterly as late as 1844. We have: 
"Swagger and impudence"; "As yet the American 
is horn-handed and pig-headed, hard, persevering, 
unscrupulous, carnivorous ; with a genius for lying." 

^ Quarterly Review, No. 20. 



122 AS OTHERS SEE US 

We are a "brigand confederation"; "Outrage 
and disorder and naked licentiousness" were rife, 
and everywhere was "that depravity that rots like 
a canker at the core of American society." 

Thomas Brothers concludes thus, "I believe there 
to be in the United States more taxation, poverty, 
and general oppression than ever known in any other 
country." ^ 

Three years later Dickens wrote, "That republic 
but yesterday let loose upon her noble course, and 
to-day so maimed and lame, so full of sores and ulcers, 
that her best friends turn from the loathsome creature 
in disgust." 

There were nearly ten years of this inflamed 
scurrility before an attempt was made in Blackwood' s 
Magazine to counteract the harm done by this 
English tone. A writer then warned the English 
that they would "turn into bitterness the last drops 
of good-will toward England that exist in the United 
States." == 

One of the most careful of our critics who studied 
us for three years felt this danger. He cries out : — 

" Why, in God's name, should we not give every assurance 
of respect and aflfection ? Are they not our children, blood of 
our blood and bone of our bone? Are they not progressive, 

' "The United States of North America as They Are," p. 228, 
Thomas Brothers, London, 1840. 

^ A Httle earlier this magazine said, — 

" The tendencies of our Constitution toward democracy have 
been checked solely by the view of the tattered and insolent guise 
in which republicanism had appeared in America." 



THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS CRITIC 1 23 

and fond of power, like ourselves? Are they not our best 
customers? Have they not the same old English, manly 
virtues? What is more befitting for us Englishmen than to 
watch with intense study and deepest sympathy the momen- 
tous strivings of this noble people ? It is the same fight we 
ourselves are fighting — the true and absolute supremacy of 
Right. Surely nothing can more beseem two great and 
kindred nations than to aid and comfort one another in that 
career of self-ennoblement, which is the end of all national as 
well as individual existence." ^ 

There is pathos, too, in the words of Washington 
Irving : — 

"Is this golden bond of kindred sympathies, so rare between 
nations, to be broken forever? Perhaps it is for the best: it 
may dispel an illusion which might have kept us in mental vas- 
salage; which might have interfered occasionally with our 
true interests, and prevented the growth of proper national 
pride. But it is hard to give up the kindred tie; and there 
are feelings dearer than interest, closer to the heart than pride, 
that will still make us cast back a look of regret, as we wander 
farther and farther from the paternal roof, and lament the 
waywardness of the parent that would repel the affections of 
the child." 

It is clear to us at this distance that these English 
reviewers got a genuine pleasure out of the books 
which most roundly abused us (Fearon, Brothers, 
Welby, Ashe, Harris, Faux, and Bradbury). We 
had won our independence, and made it extremely 
uncomfortable for England in 181 2. Her prestige 
and national vanity had suffered from these events. 
She suffered the more because of the trumpet tones 

* James Sterling, "Letters from the Slave States." 



124 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in which we bragged over these victories. They 
were organized into permanent memorials about 
which the high tides of oratory, song, and editorials 
flowed and ebbed as if by force of nature. An 
Englishman, unhappy enough to arrive here a few 
days before July 4, 1819, writes : — 

"I know we came off rather lamely in the Revolutionary 
War, but I never realized before that we began by being 
cowards and bullies and ended by being annihilated in every 
fight. I had always supposed we English whipped them at 
Bunker Hill, but these Yankees have turned it into a victory 
that ranks with Thermopylae and Waterloo. Even our Eng- 
lish warships were swept from the sea, and men that I never 
heard of are greater than Nelson at Trafalgar." 

As one follows these Englishmen about, it is 
impossible to withhold sympathy for them. There 
was not the slightest hesitation in rubbing in all 
the old victories and in all ways belittling English 
behavior in both wars. 

Nor was our form of government less irritating, 
especially when we insisted that the poor foreigner 
should forthwith admire it. De Tocqueville inti- 
mates that his approval would have had freer 
expression, if he had not been so insistently expected 
to approve. Our democracy was itself an affront 
to all Tory sentiment. Whether it were to succeed 
or fail, it was an embodied challenge to the mother 
country. It was not merely the dropping of a king 
and a hereditary House of Lords, but the separation 
of Church and State, the doing away with primo- 



THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS CRITIC 1 25 

geniture and property qualification for the vote, the 
wide extension of the suffrage, which seemed to 
strike at what were fundamental and venerated 
English traditions. There is a strong passage in 
Trevelyan which runs thus : — 

" But in order to comprehend a policy which lay so far out- 
side the known and ordinary limits of human infatuation, it 
must never be forgotten that there was a deeper and a more 
impassable gulf than the Atlantic between the colonists and 
their rulers. If Cabinet Ministers at home had known the 
Americans better, they would only have loved them less. The 
higher up in the peerage an Englishman stood, and the nearer 
to influence and power, the more unlikely it was that he would 
be in sympathy with his brethren across the seas, or that he 
would be capable of respecting their susceptibilities, and of 
apprehending their virtues, which were less to his taste even 
than their imperfections." ^ 

The English statesman, John Morley, has this 
striking confirmation of these words in discussing 
Maine's "Popular Government": — 

"The success of popular government across the Atlantic 
has been the strongest incentive to the extension of popular 
government here. We need go no farther back than the 
Reform Bill of 1867 to remind ourselves that the victory of 
the North over the South had more to do with the concession 
of the franchise to householders in boroughs than all the elo- 
quence of Mr. Gladstone and all the diplomacies of Mr. 
Disraeli." ^ 

We have learned, as in the case of murdered 
Italians in Louisiana and affronted Japanese in 

* Part I, pp. 44 and 45. 

^ "Studies in Literature," pp. 125-126. 



126 AS OTHERS SEE US 

California, that our states are related to the Federal 
Government in ways that have been an honest 
perplexity to all foreigners, as they are becoming 
a very serious perplexity to ourselves. 

During the period we are considering, there was 
practically no conception of this relation of state to 
the central government among the critics whose cen- 
sure was most resented. We can therefore at last 
not only understand, but make some measure of al- 
lowance for the caviller. We can even forgive that 
shining wit, Sydney Smith, for saying that all our 
literature was imported ; that Franklin's fame might 
possibly last for fifty years ; and that "prairies, steam- 
boats, grist-mills" were our proper heritage. 

This long wordy tiff, with much spite and heart- 
burning in it, continued until the middle of the 
centur}\ The shrih note of it begins then to soften, 
partly, I think, because so many sensible men on 
both sides became tired and ashamed of it. Its 
humiliation was that cultivated men should lend 
themselves to such a cause. Among the average 
mass of men, anything like international amenity 
and real understanding is but just beginning on the 
earth. Think of tv;o nations as advanced as Eng- 
land and France living century after century hard 
by each other, and until the most recent years having 
merely contempt for each other; the average Eng- 
lishman thinking that a Frenchman was a kind of 
monkey with clothes on, and that chiefly because 
he had a different manner and speech from the 



THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS CRITIC 12 7 

English. Though from the same trunk and with a 
common speech, there was almost as much misappre- 
hension between England and this country. It was 
not caused by primitive race antagonism or too close 
national rivalry, as between England and France. 
The misunderstanding was, nevertheless, quite as 
natural and probably as inevitable. 

In Chapter VIII we shall see it passing away for 
reasons that are humorous in their simplicity ; chiefly 
because so many people in both countries have seen 
each other closely enough and often enough to gain 
a common respect one for the other. A distinguished 
Englishman who has just been lecturing in this 
country put a world of good sense into these words, 
"I would not have believed that six weeks' good 
fellowship here in the States could have burned all 
out of me the amount of ignorance and prejudice 
that I brought to this country." That has happened 
to many thousands in both countries since the Civil 
War. This intelligent sympathy was never increas- 
ing so rapidly as at present, and it will continue with 
growing hopefulness in the future. At least with 
peoples not too widely separated by cultural stages, 
this elementary understanding has infinite promise. 
The possibilities and business necessities of modern 
travel are rapidly doing this fundamental work of 
making people so far known to each other, as to 
train them into neighborly habits and into a tolera- 
tion of superficial differences. 

The chief change in this history of criticism is that 



128 AS OTHERS SEE US 

we have now reached a stage in which men of en- 
larged experience are writing books for the express 
purpose of creating an intelligent good-will among 
nations. Into this purposed brotherhood come 
men like Bryce, Trevelyan, Archer, Muirhead, 
Miinsterberg, Abbe Klein, Von Polenz, De Rousier, 
with an interpreting message, every line of which is 
an added tie of friendly feeling and tolerance among 
peoples isolated by geographic lines but sundered 
even more by prejudice and ignorance. In the 
common darkness of this national and race misun- 
• derstanding, the devil's main work is now carried on 
in our present world. In this misunderstanding are 
the sustaining roots of the immense stupidity which 
still assumes that the permanent good of this or that 
nation is bought at the price of some other people's 
discomfiture or undoing. From the same source 
spring the low cruelties of modern warfare. Our 
continued bungling with defective children, de- 
linquent youth, and large classes of criminals will 
end only when we learn to understand. Some brave 
steps have been taken toward this saving tolerance. 
Upon its extension at home and abroad depends 
all that is meant by the word civilization. 



CHAPTER VIII 

CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 

The changes noted in this chapter are largely 
English, although French writers like Bourget, 
Madame Blanc, and Paul Adam; Germans like 
Miinsterberg, Von Polenz, and Grillenberger, indi- 
cate a corresponding change of temper. The con- 
descension is gone, or is rapidly disappearing. The 
visitor is studying a people that may disturb and 
irritate him, but our rough beginnings have taken 
on proportions that command a nev^^ kind of atten- 
tion. It is not so much what we have definitely 
achieved , as it is the unmistakable promise of achieve- 
ment, that arouses new homage. For a half century 
there has been no question of our material exploits. 
These have had compliments and marvelling enough. 
It is the whole cultural side of life in the United 
States that has been put in question. Could we 
create literature, develop science, paint pictures; 
could we reach first-rate educational standards or 
even learn to appreciate the best music? Values 
like these, with softened manners and a pleasant 
voice, were what seemed to older observers rather 
hopelessly beyond our attainment. 

There are many still to deny our possession of 
K 129 



130 AS OTHERS SEE US 

these gifts, but that we have proved our desire 
for them and a very encouraging purpose to win 
them, is heartily conceded by competent continental 
judges. 

The changes of judgment among the English 
do not come through any of these refinements. 
England began really to respect us because of the 
national strength displayed in the Civil War. The 
enduring valor, the sacrifice for an idea, both North 
and South ; the tenacity of the entire people and the 
ready acceptance of the result, were, one and all, 
arguments that are finalities to practical men of 
Anglo-Saxon origin. Barring a few holiday skits, 
the critical atmosphere changes after this date as by 
some cleansing storm. Mr. Bryce says that phi- 
losophers from Plato to Sir Robert Lowe have at- 
tributed "weakness in emergencies" to democracies, 
and further that Europeans had concluded (partly 
from internal dissensions and our habit of too much 
blustering) that we "lacked firmness and vigor." 
The Civil War, he says, undeceived Europe. "The 
North put forth its power with a suddenness and 
resolution which surprised the world. The South- 
ern people displayed no less vigor, even when the tide 
had evidently begun to turn against them." This 
Saxon trait of bowing to the hard fact of success 
appeared again when the Spanish ships went to 
pieces before American guns.* 

* In 1856 Emerson said, "It is noticeable that England is be- 
ginning to interest us a little less." 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 13I 

The eye of the foreigner noted other events, like 
that of Northern and Southern armies quietly going 
to their ordinary tasks after Appomattox. Especially 
England watched the popular frenzy that raged about 
the attempt to impeach Andrew Johnson. One of 
the ablest of English publicists, Walter Bagehot, 
wrote, "Few nations, perhaps scarcely any nation, 
could have borne such a trial so easily and so per- 
fectly." The effect was no less telling when it 
appeared that a stupendous national debt was to be 
honestly met and rapidly paid off. From Glad- 
stone this resolute facing of debts won for us the 
following tribute : — 

"In twelve years she [America] has reduced her debt by one 
hundred and fifty-eight million pounds, or at the rate of thir- 
teen million pounds for each year. In each twelve months she 
has done what we did in eight years ; her self-command, self- 
denial, and wise forethought of the future have been, to say 
the least, eightfold ours. These are facts which redounded 
greatly to her honor; and the historian will record with sur- 
prise that an enfranchised nation tolerated burdens which in 
this country a selected class, possessed of the representation, 
did not dare to face, and that the most unmitigated democracy 
known to the annals of the world resolutely reduced at its own 
cost prospective Habilities of the State which the aristocratic, 
and plutocratic, and monarchical Government of the United 
Kingdom had been contented ignobly to hand over to pos- 
terity." 

Forty years after the war John Morley wrote : — 

" Of this immense conflict Mr. Gladstone, like most of the 
leading statesmen of the time, and like the majority of his own 
countrymen, failed to take the true measure. The error that 



132 AS OTHERS SEE US 

lay at the root of our English misconceptions of the American 
struggle is now clear. We applied ordinary political maxims 
to what was not merely a political contest, but a social 
revolution." ' 

The change here indicated appears at once among 
the writers who come after the war. They seem 
for the first time really to see the United States. It 
is as if most writers before this event had been 
watching, not the United States, but some idea of 
our country which they brought with them. From 
now on there is a new deference ; even a good show 
of modesty in passing judgment on complicated 
social phenomena. There is not only more regard 
for American feeling, but a more conscientious 
attempt to interpret the objects under observation. 
The old platitudes are questioned ; the conventional 
repetition of supposed peculiarities no longer satis- 
fies. This has to be shown through trivial illustra- 
tions and by repeating some of our alleged charac- 
teristics. Yet it is these very trivialities that occupy 
half the space in these travel books. Whatever 
space is still given to them, there is an altered attitude 
as to their interpretation. "Why," says one, "should 
a whole nation set itself so joyously to the rhythmic 
use of the rocking-chair, unless this motion answers 
some physiological need? I thought at first it was 
devised for some special form of nervous diseases, 
but I soon came to find how much solid comfort I 
could have in it." 

* "Life of Gladstone," Vol. II, p. 70. 




Sir Charles Lyell 
English Scientist and Traveller in Ai 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 1 33 

A temper like that applied to every phase of a 
nation's life would give us a new critical standard. 
It reminds us of Huxley's definition of science, as 
"organized common sense." Its luminous advan- 
tage is that objects and experiences are so studied 
that one sees them in relation to the social and his- 
toric whole of which they are a part. There was 
in our Civil War an intensity of dramatic effect 
upon foreign observers that did much to create this 
new temper. There are many references to it in 
those who come after 1866. They seem to be saying : 
"Well, well, we had no idea that there was so much 
in you ; that you had such reserves of strength ; or that 
you cared so much for ideals. We shall have to make 
of you a new study." I heard a German writer 
say that the United States appeared to him abso- 
lutely destitute of all ideals until he followed the 
story of the war. "Then," he added, "I saw that 
no people had more stuff for heroism than the 
American." Our country had only been seen by 
bits. As a whole it had never been the object of 
study. I do not mean by this that one must live here 
twenty years or see every state, but that some con- 
ception of the infinite variation of life and problems 
here is fundamentally requisite. It is requisite for 
this reason, that without some sense of these differ- 
ences in social structure and development no helpful 
comparison of things that properly go together is 
possible. I heard one of the most widely known of 
living Englishmen say, "There is no scenery in the 



134 AS OTHERS SEE US 

United States." Our coast-line, with one or two 
slight exceptions (as on the coast of Maine), he 
thought tame and uninteresting. The character 
and grouping of our Rocky Mountains, he said, 
were not "scenery" in any proper sense — and so 
on. 

Now this criticism, true or false, depends upon 
comparison. The critic had in mind the varied 
magnificence of Switzerland with its splendor of 
color in snow, verdure, and water effects, or he was 
bringing together in his imagination other parts of 
the world side by side with his mental picture of this 
country. If we could once agree upon a definition 
of "scenery," these comparisons would assist us just 
so far as our observations covered the ground. But 
scenery is an affair of aesthetic taste, about which 
the only certainty is that tastes will differ. It is not 
alone a matter of coast-lines or mountain groupings. 
Upon a score of our smaller rivers, with their soft 
curves and stretching meadows ; in a hundred dainty 
nooks among the New England and Southern hills; 
in the sweep and perspective of the great plains be- 
yond the Mississippi, what is it that gives the thrill 
if it is not scenery? This is a composite and in- 
clusive term. Going south from Pueblo, Colorado, 
the train seems to sink as into a vast shallow cup 
with the Spanish Peaks on the far outer rim. I saw 
it once in an evening light so gorgeous in its inten- 
sity, that it gave one a kind of pain to look upon it, 
because there was no way to express the pressure of 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 1 35 

emotion it excited. If that was not scenery, what 
name are we to give it? 

Washington Irving had an eye for natural beauty. 
He said, "Never need an American loolc beyond his 
own country for the subUme and beautiful of natural 
scenery." Some varieties at their highest we may 
lack, but other varieties surely are ours. 

As we know our country better in quite other than 
its natural aspects, we shall apply this same test to 
all these critical decisions. We shall ask in morals, 
in education, in things social and material, that the 
comparison recognize this almost measureless diver- 
sity in the totality of American life. To see some- 
thing of this completer relation requires long and 
concentrated study or an imagination like that of 
H, G. Wells. 

This is a digression, but it should light up a little 
this point; that the recent visitors (those with even 
the least competence as critics) seem at last honestly 
to feel and to confess some sense of the magnitude 
and diversity of their task. 

Let us appeal again to the trivialities. Our 
"national habit of drinking ice-water" was in- 
variably spoken of earlier as an inexcusable freak. 
Even Steevens in his "Land of the Dollar" continues 
the tradition : — 

"It is more indispensable than a napkin, and the waiter 
who will keep you waiting ten minutes for bread, will rush 
wildly for the bottle if your ice-water sinks half an inch below 
the brim of the glass. Ring a bell at any hour of the day or 



136 AS OTHERS SEE US 

night — a panting attendant dashes in with ice-water. Sip, 
sip, sip — men, women, and little children go pouring the 
noxious stuff into their insides. The effect of this ice-water 
habit on the national constitution can only be most disastrous." ^ 

We have the new temper of which I speak in Mr. 
Muirhead's "Land of Contrasts," in which he begs 
to — 

— "warn the British visitor to suspend his judgment until 
he has been some time in the country. I certainly was not 
prejudiced in favor of this chilly draught when I started for 
the United States, but I soon came to find it natural and even 
necessary, and as much so from the dry hot air of the stove- 
heated room in winter as from the natural ambition of the 
mercury in summer. On the whole, it may be philosophic to 
conclude that a universal habit in any country has some solid 
if cryptic reason for its existence, and to surmise that the drink- 
ing of ice-water is not so deadly in the States as it might be 
elsewhere." 

Yes, it is "philosophic to conclude" that a "uni- 
versal habit" among a people may have something 
to say for itself; that it is not to be accounted for 
by any snap-shot impressions. There is scarcely 
one of the commonplace parrot phrases that is not 
now being carefully revised. 

"American houses and cars are like a lot of ovens." 
"You may travel a month without seeing a human 
being who seems to be at leisure." "Their poli- 
ticians are invariably below the average in intelli- 
gence and morals." "They are gloomily silent." 
"The American voice has a grating quality that 
» p. 177. 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 1 37 

sets every nerve on edge." There is some truth in 
every one of these statements, and in two of them 
there is a great deal of truth. That our houses and 
cars are very generally overheated, we know well. 
It would be truer to say that we used our heat too 
jerkily ; that it runs to extremes of heat and cold, as 
on our trains. But here at last comes an English- 
man who "sees a great deal of home life in several 
cities during four months." He says: "I looked 
in vain for those stifling houses of which I had read 
all my life. Upon the whole, I was no more troubled 
by heat than I have been in London." We think he 
was pretty lucky, but he should go in as a witness to 
the change of opinions. 

The third observation that no one of us seems to 
have any leisure must have far more qualifying. 
Some recent writers will give no countenance to the 
generalization whatever.^ No one will watch the 
workers, even in such a whirlpool of activity as 
Pittsburg, without some amazement at the ex- 
tremely leisurely air of whole sections of skilled 
workers, as well as among many heads of depart- 
ments upon whom great responsibility falls. De 
Tocqueville has much to say of the feverish ardor 
vtith which the Americans pursue their welfare; 
of "the strange unrest of so many happy men, 
uneasy in the midst of abundance." Until the period 

* This is also the strongly expressed opinion of the working- 
men members of the Mosley Commission to this country two 
years ago. 



138 AS OTHERS SEE US 

of discrimination came, this opinion is repeated by 
nine out of every ten of our inspectors. Mr. Muir- 
head does not let the formula pass. He is much 
more closely accurate in the following : — 

"If an Englishman has a mile to go to an appointment, he 
will take his leisurely twenty minutes to do the distance, and 
then settle his business in two or three dozen sentences; an 
American is much more likely to devour the ground in five 
minutes, and then spend an hour or more in lively conversa- 
tion not wholly pertinent to the matter in hand." ^ 

That our politicians are invariably below the aver- 
age morally and intellectually has a disheartening 
truth, so far as attention is fixed on certain city and 
state conditions. In our political life as a whole, 
there is no sense in which our representatives can be 
said to fall below the average. Both Bryce and 
Miinsterberg give strong statement to this effect. 

Wha.t is meant again by the frequent assertion 
that we are "the most silent people"? I have often 
heard this said by foreigners, and it is many times 
written. I asked one of the keenest of our observers 
what he meant by our silence. He answered: "I 
mean first, that in all public places, as you travel, 
sit at table in hotels and restaurants, in your larger 
stores, on the street and in crowds, you are strangely 
silent.^ I ask a policeman for a street, and all I 

' "The Land of Contrasts," p. 90. 

A New York paper comments thus: "Everything considered, 
though, the real dementia Americana is hurryupitis." 

'Bryce is more cautious in his statement. "They are not a 
loquacious people." — Vol. II, p. 688. 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 1 39 

get is, 'Second turn to your left.' I ask the con- 
ductor on the trolley-car to let me out at a certain 
point, and, usually, he makes no reply whatever 
but — does let me off} I ask the girl behind the 
counter for some article. Oftener than not she 
serves me without a word, as if I didn't exist." He 
hears that in our family life it is the exception to 
have much conversation at meals; that we do not 
get a pleasure out of common talk; that when the 
meal is over, the evening paper or whist becomes a 
substitute for conversation. Dickens says: "No one 
speaks at meals. They all seem to have tremendous 
secrets on their minds." One of the critics con- 
cludes that our joking habit spoils conversation. 
"The funny man is a national calamity." Another 
thinks that we are so busy that our nervous energy 
is exhausted, and therefore we are too tired to talk. 
A third carries this a step farther, saying that 
"Americans have not yet had time to develop the 
habits and forms of easy verbal intercourse." Still 
another says, "The Americans are too afraid of 
each other to talk much." ^ 

^ One wonders if this critic could have read De Amicis on the 
land of William the Silent. In his chapter on The Hague, he de- 
scribes at length this characteristic of silence or scanty response 
to your inquiries. He tells of the great pains they will take to do 
the things you ask, but without words — "sans prof^rer une pa- 
role." 

^ It is of her own countrymen at table d'hote that the English 
writer, Miss Betham-Edwards, asks : " What deadly feud of blood, 
caste, or religion could thus keep them apart? Whilst the little 
knot of Gallic travellers at the farther end of the table straightway 



140 AS OTHERS SEE US 

I have quoted these views to several of our country- 
men who have had large experience. If they reflect 
with some care on the criticisms, they usually admit 
their truth as applied to a great deal of our life. 
On a coast steamer crowded with Americans, I 
saw a French family sitting together at meals. 
Their conversation among themselves was incessant, 
and day after day so full of gaiety that everybody 
showed a kind of fascination in watching the ani- 
mated group. An American, observing it, asked : 
"Why is it that we haven't sense enough at least to 
cultivate a habit with so much charm and health 
in it as that ? It would cure us of our dyspepsia and 
many other national vices." 

But W'ith whom are we compared? Do the Eng- 
lish people, as a whole, talk more freely than we? 
Do the Norwegians or the Germans ? We know that 
Latin people have a joy in conversation which 
northern nations but poorly imitate. We know, 
also, that to a large part of the Americans, "silence" 
is as little a characteristic as sky-blue is of the com- 
plexion. Professor Janet wishes to set history right 
on this point by saying, "The Americans talk much 
more freely than the English and the Dutch." 

That "the Americans have the worst voices known 
among civilized people " is a generalization much 
nearer the fact than that we are silent. What can 

fall into friendliest talk, the long rows of Britons of both sexes 
and all ages speak only in subdued voices and to the members of 
their own family." 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 141 

have caused such a voice is many times an object 
of curious inquiry.* CUmate, nervous tension, ill 
health, especially among the women, are the most 
frequent explanations. Another thinks overstrain- 
ing of the vocal organs during our long life on the 
border, when the women had to strain their voices 
in calling the men-folks to meals, accounts for it. 
More astonishing is the theory that traces our irri- 
tating utterance to the absence of monarchy and a 
superior class. If we had been civilized enough to 
keep these hallowed possessions, we should have 
unconsciously preserved and cultivated a subdued 
and deferential vocalization. Another, perhaps with 
the same thought, says we have bad voices because 
we have a bad government. Believing in democracy 
and the equalities, we put gruffness, loudness, and 
bluster into the voice ! As this is unnatural, it 
impairs the vocal organs. One other thing is full 
of inspiration: it is that which attributes this special 
inferiority to the lack of tipping waiters and depend- 
ants. The softening influence of a monarchy we 
have lost, but the tipping system may be made a 
substitute. Does it not cultivate graciousness in 
the giver, and mild and gentle ways in the receiver? 
We are told that this form of generosity, which acts 
automatically upwards and downwards, produces 

* ... I once said to a lady, "Why do you drawl out your 
words in that way?" 

"Well," replied she, "I'd drawl all the way from Maine to 
Georgia rather than clip my words as you English people do." — 
Marryat, Vol. I, p. 222. 



142 AS OTHERS SEE US 

an atmosphere of good manners which includes a 
milder and more pliant voice. At the time of this 
happy exposition (1840) there was no tipping in 
sight, nor any hopeful sign of tipping to come. 
There is no doubt that the remedy is at last ours, or 
that it has a wide and contagious popularity. We 
may therefore free ourselves from this special source 
of worry. 

I am not certain that Professor Freeman observed 
the effects of the tipping cure in its early stages, but 
he is one of the first to come to our defence in the 
way of intelligent and truthful observation. Instead 
of reckless generali;^ation like "Americans speak with 
an intolerable quality of voice," he discriminates. 
He uses the comparative method, not alone as applied 
to one nation with another nation, but, of greater 
importance, he gets corresponding classes or sections 
in each country into some relation, section with 
section, so that a real comparison can be made. 
The earlier vice was to compare a selected and better 
class in England with the miscellaneous, rough and 
tumble life as seen in the American coach, train, or 
boarding-house. We come off less badly as to voice 
in what Professor Freeman says : — 

"Some people have the twang very strongly; some have it 
not at all. Some, after speaking for a long time without it, will 
bring it in in a particular word or sentence; in others it is 
strongly marked when a few words are uttered suddenly, but 
dies off in the course of a longer conversation. And I dis- 
tinctly marked that it was far more universal among women 
than among men." 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 1 43 

Professor Mills (McGill University), speaking of 
indistinctness and muffling the voice, says, "It is 
found in English and German also. English speech 
is often hard and guttural, German unduly guttural, 
if not hard ; and American slovenly and horribly 
nasal."* That method throws a little light on the 
general obscurity. It does not leave the whole sin at 
our doors. 

At first the American press reporter is "as in- 
credibly ignorant as he is incompetent and ill- 
mannered." The tone is now rather that of William 
Archer : ^ — 

"All the pleasant expectations I brought with me to 
America have been realized, all the forebodings disappointed. 
Even the interviewer is far less terrible than I had been led 
to imagine. He always treated me with courtesy, sometimes 
with comprehension." 

This is the spirit of Herbert Spencer and Dean 
Hole. Dean Hole says : — 

"I was interviewed by more than two hundred journalists 
of both sexes, and so far from being bored by their tedious 
dulness or exasperated by their inquisitive curiosity, — as 
certain false prophets had foretold, — I was universally pleased 
by their courtesy and instructed by their information." ^ 

Munsterberg, who has had much discipline at the 
hands of reporters, thus whites in his "Americans," 
"The American journalist is usually a gentleman and 
can be relied on to be discreet." 

^ "Voice Production," Lippincott, 1906, p. 146. 

^ "America To-day." 

' "A Little Tour in America." 



144 AS OTHERS SEE US 

A final illustration will mark still better the change 
of tone. A sturdy volume could be filled with asser- 
tions to the effect that beyond all nations we are 
consumed by the greedy passion for money. Several 
books bear titles like "The Land of Dollars." 
Many chapters either give exclusive attention to this 
mad hunt for lucre, or dwell upon it at great length. 
It may be admitted that other peoples have an inci- 
dental regard to their pecuniar}^ interests, but we 
Americans make it "a seven-day religion." Harriet 
Martineau, so far as my record shows, was the first 
to challenge this criticism. 

"I have studied with some care the minds and manners of 
a variety of merchants, and other persons engaged in com- 
merce, and have certainly found a regard to money a more 
superficial and intermitting influence than various others." ' 

This is cautiously worded, as if she were not quite 
sure of her ground. Even De Tocqueville had laid 
this sin of money-loving upon us with a heavy hand. 
But this man of genius was comparing us to an upper 
section of European society whose income was, 
for the most part, earned by their tenants or other 
people. It has always been easy for such as these 
to show the most graceful indifference to money. 
Of the vast majority of hard-working Frenchmen 
he is not thinking. On this point the pages of 
Balzac are like a mirror.^ We look into them and see 
reflected there such a hungry regard for money and 

* "Society in America," Vol. I, p. 142. 

^ These are words we owe to a French economist: "We buy 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 1 45 

rentes as cannot be found in a page of American 
history. Chevalier was speaking of a wider class 
still in his country when he said, "Nowhere do 
you see specimens of that sordid avarice of which 
examples are so common among us." ^ This accurate 
truth-telling about the love of money in England is 
as pitiless in Thackeray's novels as it is in Balzac. 
America has no literature which shows the sin in 
grosser or more prevalent form than in these two 
masters as they lay bare this passion among their 
own people. 

We can now appeal on this topic to other writers. 
Professor Miinsterberg's estimate is as follows : — 

"The American does not prize his possessions much unless 
he has worked for them himself; of this there are innumerable 
proofs, in spite of the opposite appearances on the surface. 
One of the most interesting of these is the absence of the bridal 
dower. In Germany or France the man looks on a wealthy 
marriage as one of the most reliable means of getting an in- 
come; there are whole professions which depend on a man's 
eking out his entirely inadequate salary from property which 
he inherits or gets by marriage; and the eager search for a 
handsome dowry — in fact, the general commercial character 
of marriage in reputable European society everywhere — 
always surprises Americans. Everywhere one sees the 

a woman with our fortune, or we sell ourselves to her for her dower. 
The American chooses her, or rather offers himself to her, for her 
beauty, her intelligence, or her amiable qualities, and asks no other 
portion. Thus, whilst we make a traffic of what is most sacred, 
these shopkeepers exhibit a delicacy and loftiness of feeling, which 
have done honor to the most perfect models of chivalry." 

* P- 303- 
L 



146 AS OTHERS SEE US 

daughters of wealthy families stepping into the modest homes 
of their husbands, and these husbands would feel it to be a 
disgrace to depend on their prosperous fathers-in-law. An 
actual dowry received from the bride's parents during their 
lifetime is virtually unknown. Another instance of American 
contempt for unearned wealth, which especially contrasts with 
European customs, is the disapproval which the American 
always has for lotteries. If he were really bent on getting 
money, he would find the dowry and the lottery a ready 
means." * 

"The American chases after money with all his might, ex- 
actly as on the tennis-court he tries to hit the ball, and it is the 
game he likes and not the prize. If he loses, he does not feel as 
if he had lost a part of himself, but only as if he had lost the 
last set in a tournament." ^ 

Earlier still Mr. Bryce wrote: "A millionnaire 
has a better and easier social career open to him in 
England than in America. In America if his private 
character be bad, if he be mean, or openly immoral, 
or personally vulgar, or dishonest, the best society 
will keep its doors closed against him. In England 
great wealth, skilfully employed, will more readily 
force these doors to open. For in England great 
wealth can, by using the appropriate methods, 
practically buy rank from those who bestow it; or 
by obliging persons, whose position enables them to 
command fashionable society, can induce them to 
stand sponsors for the upstart, and force him into 
society, a thing which no person in America has the 
power to do." ^ 

^ "The Americans," p. 231. ^ Ibid., p. 234. 

^ "American Commonwealth," Vol. II, p. 604. 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 147 

In general, what has increased this new tone in 
our favor is unquestionably the advent of the United 
States as a "World Power." Whether this new role 
is to fit us or unfit us, is open to doubt, but the kind of 
impression it has made abroad, is not open to doubt. 

At the opening of the twentieth century, one of the 
most brilliant of English journalists begins his 
Preface with the words,^ "The advent of the United 
States of America as the greatest of world powers is 
the greatest political, social, and commercial phe- 
nomenon of our times." He says, "That the United 
States of America have now arrived at such a pitch 
of power and prosperity as to have a right to claim 
the leading place among English-speaking nations, 
cannot be disputed." Then with much vigor he 
pleads for a vitalized union of English and American 
interests. He quotes Balfour's words, "The idea 
of a war with the United States of America carries 
with it something of the unnatural horror of civil 
war." He adds passages from Gladstone and 
Cecil Rhodes which ring with the same world note. 
He even reports Lord Derby when in Gladstone's 
Cabinet as saying to Dr. Dillon, "The highest ideal 
I can look forward to in the future of my country 
is that the time may come when we may be admitted 
into the American Union as states in one great 
federation." ^ This outsteps Professor Dicey's sug- 

* W. T. Stead, "The Americanization of the World," London, 
1902. 

^ Mr. Stead reproduces a famous English cartoon which 



148 AS OTHERS SEE US 

gestion of political representation of the United 
States in the English Parliament.^ 

Years before any of these words were spoken, 
Richard Cobden wrote, "Our only chance of national 
prosperity lies in the timely remodelling of our 
system so as to put it as nearly as possible upon an 
equality with the improved management of the 
Americans," The irresistible journalist, Mr. Stead, 
is not, however, to be outdone. He will have the 
English people to whom he belongs unite with us in 
the celebration of July Fourth. If we gasp at this 
suggestion he says, "The practice of hoisting flags 
on the birthday of the American Republic has been 
gaining ground in Great Britain, and here and there 
Britons have begun to set apart the sacred Fourth of 
July as a fete-day of the race." Not wishing to be 
oversanguine, he admits that the "ordinary British 
subject cannot be expected just yet to enter into this 
common rejoicing without some hesitation." But 
he adds, "As year after year passes he will come to 
celebrate the Fourth of July heartily and ungrudg- 
ingly." To remove the lingering prejudices, we on 

dresses John Bull in Uncle Sam's attire, and puts upon the body 
of the American eagle a lion's head. 

' This profound student of politics uses these words: "The 
plain truth is, that educated Englishmen are slowly learning that 
the American Republic accords the best example of a conservative 
democracy; and now that England is becoming democratic, re- 
spectable Englishmen are beginning to consider whether the Con- 
stitution of the United States may not afford means by which, 
under new democratic forms, may be preserved the political con- 
servatism dear and habitual to the governing classes of England." 




Charles Dickens 



CHANGE OF TONE IN FOREIGN CRITICISM 1 49 

our side must unite on Shakespeare's birthday and 
on the day when Magna Charta was signed. And 
one step farther in the general healing — we must 
all unite on the third of September, "It was 
Cromwell's great day, the day of Dunbar and 
Worcester, the day on which he opened his Parlia- 
ments, the day on which he passed into the presence 
of his Maker. Cromwell, the common hero of both 
sections of the race, summoned his first Parliament 
on the Fourth of July, and his inaugural address 
was the first Fourth of July oration that was ever 
delivered. It was instinct with the conviction of 
the reality of the providential mission of the English- 
speaking race. In his own words, "We have our 
desire to see healing and looking forward (rather) 
than to rake into sores and look backward." If the 
interchange of courtesies and fete-day shouting is 
to be made so easy as this, it is not for Americans to 
hesitate. 

In 181 3 so responsible a person as the English 
Ambassador Foster said of us publicly, "Generally 
speaking, they are not a people we should be proud 
to acknowleged as our relation." In 1829 the 
author of "Tom Cringle's Log" ^ said in Black- 
wood's Magazine: "I don't like Americans. I never 
did and never shall like them. I have seldom met 
an American gentleman in the large and complete 
sense of the term. I have no wish to eat with them, 
drink with them, deal with them, or consort with 
them in any way." 

1 Michael Scott. 



150 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Many and interesting things appear to have 
happened between this and Mr. Stead's invitation 
to international fete-days grouped about July the 
Fourth. 

This "journalist who thinks in continents" does 
not after all take much higher flight than the Oxford 
scholar, Freeman, who could say: "It is indeed a 
thrilling thought for a man of the elder England to 
see what a home the newest home of his people is. 
The heart swells, the pride of kinship rises, as he 
sees that it is his own folk which has done more 
than any other folk to replenish the earth and to 
subdue it. He is no Englishman at heart, he has 
no true feeling of the abiding tie of kindred, who 
deems that the glory and greatness of the child is 
other than part of the glory and greatness of the 
parent." 



CHAPTER IX 

HIGHER CRITICISM 

John Stuart Mill called De Tocqueville's 
"Democracy" "the first philosophical book ever 
written on democracy as it manifests itself in modern 
society." ^ Until 1888 no book at all comparable 
to it had been written. It was said that every 
thinking man in Europe had to read it, in order to 
avoid the constant confession that he had not read 
it. Alexis de Tocqueville, though the son of a peer 
of France, took his stand as a youth of twenty -five 
for the French Revolution of 1830. At the close of 
his school studies, he made a long tour in Italy 
and Sicily, where he worked at politics and institu- 
tions with "incredible pains," to use his own words. 
On his return, he was given, for a lad of twenty-one, 
an important position {juge auditeur). Political 
and social studies were from this time his pursuit. 
With no man can we less connect the word cranky 
or flighty. Only when he became convinced that 
Charles X either could not or would not understand 
constitutional freedom, did he yield to the Revolution 

* He also says it is the first analytic inquiry into the influence 
of democracy. 



152 AS OTHERS SEE US 

of 1830. His moral and intellectual struggles at 
this period determined his career. He had become 
convinced that the permanent defeat of democracy 
was impossible. How, then, could he better equip 
himself for service to his country than go at once 
to America? He had already discovered the most 
competent man in this country, the historian Jared 
Sparks, to guide him in his first studies of the town- 
meeting. He reached New York in 1831, spending 
a year in travel and incessant study. He rose in 
France to be Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1849, 
receiving, for his moral courage, the honor of im- 
prisonment at the hands of Louis Napoleon on the 
second of December, 185 1. 

It is better to put down first the critical word about 
these volumes. There is so much eloquence, so 
much elevation of tone, so much sympathy with every 
ideal aim of democracy, that one has to be a little on 
the defensive. For present usefulness, de Tocque- 
ville does not equal some later authors who are far 
his inferiors. Even he came with a bias. He 
brought an ideal of political society with him. He 
had committed himself heart and hand to the con- 
stitutional hopes under Louis Philippe. He wanted 
evidence. He wished to show that the people could 
govern themselves. He had heard that this self- 
government resting in the town-meeting was tri- 
umphant in the United States. 

With the vision of what he wanted, he came to 
prepare for his great book. There is a little line in 



^ 




Alexis de Tocqueville 
Author of "Democracy in America" 



HIGHER CRITICISM 1 53 

his Introduction which tells all there is to tell about 
his bias, "J'avoue que dans V Anierique, fai vu plus 
que rAmerique" — "I grant that in America I saw 
more than was there." But more than this seeking 
of evidence that he was eager to find was his in- 
tellectual habit of dealing with large political ab- 
stractions. These never leave him quite free to 
follow the humbler indications of the facts before 
him. It was the method of his time. Even the 
hard-headed Chevalier cannot get his book under 
way, without imposing inferences drawn from all 
corners of the antique world. The two races sup- 
posed to flow from Japhet and Shem are essential 
to a true understanding of democracy in America, 
as are the Roman Empire, China, and Japan. We 
now know that two generations ago these august and 
sounding analogies, if applied to modern conditions, 
served chiefly to conceal the facts or to muddle and 
bewilder our relation to the facts. Even at the 
present time, it is only here and there that a scholar 
is wise enough to flourish those ancient societies 
before us without enveloping the audience in a gen- 
eral haze. I heard the president of an eastern college 
once say, "When we are discussing these modern 
political problems, if any one raises Greece and 
Rome, I always vote to adjourn." Mr. Dooley is 
of the same mind: "Whiniver I go to a pollytical 
meetin', an' th' laad with th' open-wnarruk face 
mentions Rome or Athens, I grab for me hat. I 
know he's not goin' to say anything that ought to 
keep me out iv bed." 



154 AS OTHERS SEE US 

This was so the usage of de Tocqueville's time that, 
although very temperate, he cannot wholly avoid the 
temptation. Too frequently these classical analogies 
are a substitute for good argument. But this is 
only a part of de Tocqueville's real weakness. He 
has a delight in working out large formulas about 
liberty, equality, democracy, and public opinion. 
These become in his mind "principles," as they in- 
deed are, but he gets them too soon and too easily. 
Above all, he gives them shape before the facts quite 
justify him. He is so tenacious of these principles, 
that he inclines to rule out facts, or not to see them, 
if they disturb his general position. His generaliza- 
tion often seems to drive him off his natural course, 
as when he conjures up his group of little political 
factions, or sees the steady decrease of the Federal 
Power. 

He was led by his formula to fix upon us, as a 
democracy, certain matter-of-fact habits of mind 
which were precisely as true of England as of us. 
He wanted to endow the democratic mind with great 
capacity for action, but not for thought and reflec- 
tion. We produced, forsooth, "no inventors." This 
cunning was not in the democratic mind. Very 
remarkable achievements were already at hand 
before a printed line of de Tocqueville had reached 
this country. Again, equality so reacts upon us 
that, as a democracy, we will not "recognize our 
faults." What government does ? Are aristocracies 
eager to confess them? No one to-day could con- 



HIGHER CRITICISM 155 

ceive of this disinclination to "recognize our faults" 
as in the least peculiar to democracies. Yet, as 
Newman said of some book, that "it was always 
open to criticism and always above criticism," so 
one must say of this master's study of democracy. 

It would be unjust not to admit that his abstract 
method gives him in other ways and for other phases 
of his problem both strength and insight. A hand- 
to-mouth policy, cheap expediencies, and the dog- 
matism of common sense are such ever present 
weaknesses in democracy, that we should greet the 
more cordially a type of man to whom large prin- 
ciples have some sacredness. 

De Tocqueville did not merely think in principles, 
but he acted upon them in his political career. He 
possessed those high and rare distinctions in a 
politician, convictions, and human sympathy without 
cant. It is because these were thought out and lived 
out, that his "Democracy in America" has for us 
such priceless value. As we follow his pages, we 
see our troubles as through mists, but the mists 
are radiant and the light of a great hope shoots 
through them. Critics have said that democracy, 
as a better form of government, was conceived of 
by de Tocqueville as a fatality; that it was bear- 
ing down upon us with forces so irresistible that 
argument and effort for or against it were alike 
futile. Few careful readers will draw this con- 
clusion. Democracy is not to de Tocqueville 
necessarily a good. If it prove a good, it will be 



156 AS OTHERS SEE US 

SO only because citizens do their part in directing 
the forces that make for equahty. Democracy 
will bear fruit, sweet or sour, according to the soil 
of character in which it grows. In this conception, 
there is indeed "destiny," but it is the destiny of 
character. Democracy rises or falls as men put 
into it their best or their worst. 

As a qualification for really enlightening national 
criticism, I have laid great stress on a capacity for 
common human sympathy. At least imaginatively, 
de Tocqueville had this at a very early age, and it 
deepens in him as a result of his social studies. He 
conceived a kind of horror for the way in which 
aristocratic classes had governed the masses. He 
came to believe that the gradual softening of manners 
was due largely to a growing social equality. He 
says, "When the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, 
who all belonged to the aristocracy by birth or 
education, relate the tragical end of a Noble, their 
grief flows apace ; whereas they tell you at a breath, 
and without wincing, of massacres and torture in- 
flicted on the common sort of people.^ To bring 
this vividly before us, he quotes a letter as late in his 
country's history as the time of Madame de Sevigne. 
This brilliant and kindly woman is writing to her 
daughter of what she had herself looked upon. 
After a few affectionate pleasantries, she asks her 
daughter, 

* "Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 301. 



HIGHER CRITICISM 1 57 

"Do you wish to hear the news from Rennes? A tax of a 
hundred thousand crowns has been imposed upon the citizens ; 
and if this sum is not produced within four and twenty hours, 
it is to be doubled and collected by the soldiers. They have 
cleared the houses and sent away the occupants of one of the 
great streets, and forbidden anybody to receive them on pain 
of death; so that the poor wretches— old men, women near 
their confinement, and children included — may be seen wan- 
dering round and crying on their departure from this city, 
without knowing where to go, and without food or a place to 
lie in. Day before yesterday, a fiddler was broken on the 
wheel for getting up a dance and stealing some stamped paper. 
He was quartered after death, and his Umbs exposed at the 
four comers of the city. Sixty citizens have been thrown into 
prison, and the business of punishing them is to begin to-mor- 
row. This province sets a fine example to the others, teaching 
them above all things to respect their governors and not to 
throw any more stones into their garden." ^ 

She then, as if pas.sing to really important matters, 
tells of the visit of Madame de Tarente and the 
preparations for her coming ; the lunch and festivities. 
Between the description of the gaieties in a later 
letter, she adds incidentally that they were at that 
moment "less jaded with capital punishments, only 
one a week, just to keep up appearances." "Hang- 
ing," she says, "seems to me quite a cooling enter- 
tainment." 

De Tocqueville selects this famous lady because 
she was notably a kind person, neither "selfish nor 
cruel"; yet because of the caste system of which 
she was a part, she "had no clear notion of suffering 
in any one vdio was not a person of quality." 

* "Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 201. 



158 AS OTHERS SEE US 

As he comes to this country, one of his first im- 
pressions of the Americans is that "they are ex- 
tremely open to compassion," ^ as shown, among 
other examples, in their administration of justice. 

That the equalizing of social conditions under 
republican institutions is the one hope for the human- 
izing of the world, is the conviction of this converted 
aristocrat. 

"When all the ranks of a community are nearly equal, as all 
men think and feel in nearly the same manner, each of them 
may judge in a moment of the sensations of all the others ; — 
there is no wretchedness into which he cannot readily enter, 
and a secret instinct reveals to him its extent. . . . Something 
like a personal feeling is mingled with his pity and makes him 
suffer whilst the body of his fellow-creature is in pain." 

WHiat these qualities may at last do for the race in 
really civilizing them into a great brotherhood, is a 
dream that works powerfully upon the imagination 
of this great publicist. His book is not to be appre- 
ciated — neither its faults nor virtues — apart from 
this conception. 

"The more I advanced in the study of American society, 
the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the 
fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived 
and the central point at which all my observations constantly 
terminated." 

To think of de Tocqueville and to criticise him 
as if he were strictly the scientific investigator is to 
miss his highest quality. To think of him as in- 

' Several foreigners note this kindness to animals as if it were 
new in their experience. 



HIGHER CRITICISM 1 59 

slinctively the artist, using his imagination to create 
a model of democratic relationship among men, 
is to see him as he is. His one sustained passion 
is for freedom, which he calls the ^^ sainte et legitime 
passion de Phomme." He writes to Mr. Reeve, 
'^Je ii'ai qu'une passion, V amour de la liberie et de 
la dignite humalneJ^ It is this which keeps him 
from being a good "party man." It was this which 
made him fear that one of our own great dangers 
was the possible tyranny of party majorities. It 
was this which gave hijn a prophetic insight into the 
essential dangers of slavery. And here we touch one 
of those larger issues which is lighted up by seeing 
it through a great principle. That a house divided 
against itself could not stand was a principle with 
Abraham Lincoln. If dark troubles are before us, 
de Tocqueville says, "They will be brought about 
by the presence of the black race on the soil of the 
United States. That is, they (the troubles) will owe 
their origin not to equality, but to the inequality 
of conditions." ^ He sees that slavery must end, 
but is under no illusions that race antagonism will 
then cease. Those who think amalgamation is a 
solution "delude themselves." "I am not led to 
any such conclusion." When they are at last freed, 
the social troubles will increase because the negro 
will demand political rights. He reads the North 
this lesson, "Whoever has inhabited the United 
States must have perceived that in those parts of the 

* "Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 315. 



l6o AS OTHERS SEE US 

Union in which negroes are no longer slaves, they 
have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the 
contrary, the prejudice of race appears to be stronger 
in the States which have abolished slavery than in 
those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so in- 
tolerant as in those States where servitude has never 
been known." 

Here is no mere flaying of the South, as if the 
North had no part in the slave evil, but a perfectly 
true note from the point of view of the National 
Whole. To de Tocqueville democracy of some 
kind was inevitable. It was not to be argued with 
any more than the passage of time. It was not 
perhaps the highest conceivable social relation. 
It certainly held within itself the gravest perils, but 
that it was becoming the fact to which peoples must 
adjust themselves seemed to him like a fate. This 
is the clearer to us when we see what he meant by 
democracy. He is not thinking, like so many of 
our critics, of democracy as a form of government. 
He is thinking of social conditions in which the 
utmost obtainable equality exists. Renan in his 
''Caliban" maintains that History is "a good 
aristocrat." To de Tocqueville, Destiny is a name 
for the inevitable disappearance of aristocracy. It 
is fundamental to him that all sorts of people should 
mingle and intervene more and more in government. 
If they intervene wisely and vrith public spirit, it 
will be a good government. The equality of condi- 

^ " Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 460, 



HIGHER CRITICISM l6l 

tions which he found in this country was what most 
attracted him. He told the French people that they 
too would reach the same conditions even if they did 
not "draw the same political consequences." 

With this conception of democracy clearly in 
mind, we better understand his opinions, his hopes, 
and his fears. His gloom over the slavery question 
was because he could not see how democracy could 
develop here including the negro, even if the slaves 
were freed. When they come to demand political 
and other equalities, will the white race submit? 
If not, how can a class rule, antagonistic to democ- 
racy, be avoided? 

Equality of conditions and an increasing inter- 
vention of all in government, is thus preliminary in 
de Tocqueville's thought. Just as primary is it 
that increase of liberty is good. Our safety in the 
United States is this enlargement of freedom, and 
nothing subtler or truer can be "found in his volumes 
than some of the practical inferences from this 
principle of liberty, as applied to our political experi- 
ence. He sees that changes in this country are to 
come with extraordinary rapidity, but he does not 
fear them. That we ourselves shall shrink before 
the changes essential to our best growth, is to him 
the real danger. That we shall accept the situation ; 
that we shall submit even with servility to existing 
evils, is what threatens. To understand this peril, 
if it be such, we are to see clearly what sort of people 
we are. One passage shows this characteristic : — 

M 



l62 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans 
pursue their own welfare; and to watch the vague dread that 
constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the 
shortest path which may lead to it. A native of the United 
States clings to this world's goods as if he were certain never 
to die, and is so hasty at grasping at all within his reach, that 
one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long 
enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds 
nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh grati- 
fication. . . . 

"At first sight there is something surprising in this strange 
unrest of so many happy men, uneasy in the midst of abun- 
dance. The spectacle is, however, as old as the world; the 
novelty is to see a whole people furnish an example of it." 

Here we are in our entirety as a nation, no temper- 
ing class excepted, all devoted to business and com- 
mercial interests. But why should this fact lead to 
checks upon liberty, to submission, and even to 
servility ? ^ The level from which de Tocqueville 
speaks is that of the National Whole and the Com- 
mon Welfare. He has not in mind temporary 
interests; much less mere private interests. He is 
thinking of large public policies that include the 
general good and of long-range action that includes 
future social welfare. 

We can to-day give a hundred illustrations of 
this peril where the author could have given a 
single one. Recently a flood devastated the City 

* As it is so hopeless in a single chapter to touch one in a score 
of the Author's points, I select one of the most important in the 
hope of making his purpose and spirit clearer. I shall not depart 
from that spirit by translating it into the language of present 
political experience. 



HIGHER CRITICISM 163 

of Pittsburg. The enlightened chief of the For- 
estry Department, Gifford Pinchot, hastens to ex- 
plain to the public what this means. Our losses 
as a nation have already run into millions beyond 
any calculating. From every part of the country, 
the men of science for tv^^o decades have been 
scattering among the people a wholly disinterested 
report of our "impending social dangers." It is 
true we have made a brave beginning in heeding 
warnings, but at the most important points, the 
public safety and future welfare are so fiercely 
opposed by pulp and timber interests as to defeat 
the most elementary work in safeguarding society. 
Pittsburg's jeopardy is but one among hundreds, 
but it strikes a great city and may be seen. That 
the people may get some hint of its meaning, Mr. 
Pinchot speaks through the press as follows : — 

*'The great flood which has wrought devastation and ruin 
to the Upper Ohio Valley is due fundamentally to the cutting 
away of the forests on the watersheds of the Allegheny and 
Monongahela rivers. These streams have their source in the 
heart of the Alleghany Mountains, which are high and steep 
and receive a heavy rainfall. The valleys through which 
these mountain streams flow are narrow and deep. Originally 
these steep mountain slopes contained as fine hardwood 
forests as existed in the country. Beneath the tree tops a 
heavy undergrowth and thick cover of leaves on the ground, 
and the intertwining roots of trees and shrubs so held back 
the water from rains and melting snow that dangerous floods 
seldom occurred. 

"Cutting of the timber has gone on to such an extent that 
not enough oak and chestnut can be obtained now to supply 



164 AS OTHERS SEE US 

ties to the railroads which run through the region. Fire has 
followed cutting and aided in the work of destruction by burn- 
ing up the underbrush and leaf cover until many mountain 
slopes are absolutely barren, and water rushes from them as 
from a house roof. The ruin of the mountains is now accom- 
plishing the ruin of the valley. All along the Allegheny and 
Monongahela rivers and far down the Ohio Valley are wreck 
and devastation. Disease will come when its fruitful germs 
shall have multiplied over every foot of the inundated valley. 
"The value of the property destroyed in this one flood is 
probably sufficient to buy enough land at the head waters of 
these streams to fully protect them. Great floods are becoming 
common occurrences upon the eastern rivers which have their 
sources in the high mountains. Such floods, with increasing 
intensity, must be expected from year to year until the im- 
portant watersheds are protected." 

The fatuous outcry that a wise forestry policy is 
"un-American"; that it is to be opposed because it 
is "socialism," will, of course, continue, although the 
most conservative governments in the world have 
long practised it with such conspicuous success, from 
the public point of view, that the very cranks of 
conservatism no longer question it. 

With careless prodigality, we have scattered these 
most primary sources of wealth, precisely as we 
scattered transportation and other franchises upon 
which dangerous private monopolies were built. 
With the franchises, we have in this generation come 
to see clearly the kind of mistakes that have been 
made. In the teeth of extreme difficulties, we are 
trying to protect the public through legislative con- 
trol of these corporations. We are learning the 



HIGHER CRITICISM 1 65 

same lesson in our forestry. We have the lesson 
still to learn as applied to the remaining mining, 
pasture, and oil lands. If it was a weakness, as 
we have seen, that de Tocqueville dealt too much 
with large abstract principles, it was also the source 
of strength, as in this instance. He knew that the 
"benevolent despot" could act for the nation as a 
whole. Could a large invertebrate democracy like 
ours escape from the clutch of short-range compet- 
ing interests? Could such a democracy rise to 
this working conception of the Commonwealth as 
against the terrible political pressure of "the 
interests"? 

It is this problem at the present moment that is 
testing our democracy as by fire. De Tocqueville 
saw the nature of it with the same seerlike vision with 
which he saw the real nature of the negro problem. 
It is not, he says, liberty that we have to fear, but the 
hesitations and conservatism of practical business 
interests. Whatever a wise monarch may do, no 
democracy realizes this kind of peril until population 
has so developed as to evoke a variety of interests, 
that finally come into conscious conflict. Lumber, 
grazing, mining, control of water powers, furnish 
such an illustration at the present moment. It is 
out of this narrower conflict that the larger public 
interest slowly emerges, so that it can be seen as 
something above and apart from any or all of these 
immediate pecuniary concerns. Nothing in the 
statesmanship of President Roosevelt will win him 



1 66 AS OTHERS SEE US 

surer laurels in the future than his pluck and con- 
sistency toward this policy which stands for the 
whole people and for the future. For the first time 
in our history, we have from the Chief Executive 
the full purpose of this social policy outlined. " Min- 
eral fields, like the forests and navigable streams, 
should be treated as public utilities." 

"It would surely be greatly to the advantage of this country 
if some at least of the coal fields of the East, and especially of 
the anthracite fields, had been left under the control of the 
Government. Let us provide in the West against the recur- 
rence of the conditions which we deplore in the East. 

"The withdrawal of these coal lands would constitute a 
policy analogous to that which has been followed in with- 
drawing the forest lands from ordinary settlement. The 
coal, like the forests, should be treated as the property of the 
public and its disposal should be under conditions which 
would go to the benefit of the public as a whole. 

"This Government should not now repeat the mistakes of 
the past. Let us not do what the next generation cannot 
undo. We have a right to the proper use of both the forests 
and the fuel during our lifetime, but we should not dispose 
of the birthright of our children. If this Government sells its 
remaining fuel lands, they pass out of its future control. If it 
now leases them, we retain control, and a future Congress will 
be at Hberty to decide whether it will continue or change this 
policy." 

Will our legislators be strong enough and inde- 
pendent enough to act for all of us, rather than for 
the few struggling for privilege ? To know that our 
dangers are in the servility of the politicians to local 
and private business at the points where these conflict 



HIGHER CRITICISM 1 67 

with public weal, is to "see the enemy," as de Tocque- 
ville conceives him in a democracy. 

It was of de Tocqueville that Mill was thinking 
when he used the term, "The American Many," 
as representing so exclusively the business class that 
"impose upon all the rest of society its own type, 
forcing all to submit to it or to imitate it." ^ Yet 
de Tocqueville does not abate one jot of his faith in 
democracy. He holds to liberty because it "corrects 
the abuse of liberty." " Extreme democracy ob- 
viates the dangers of democracy." ^ Yet the hand- 
maid of freedom must be a vigilant and universal 
discipline. No one ever put more trust in popular 
education as a remedy. Nor does any incidental 
evil discourage him. There is extreme severity in 
his judgment upon our Press : — 

"The journalists of the United States are generally in a 
very humble position, with a scanty education and a vulgar 
turn of mind.^ 

"The characteristics of the American journalist consist in 
an open and coarse appeal to the passions of his readers; he 
abandons principles to assail the characters of individuals, to 
track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses 
and vices. 

"Nothing can be more deplorable than this abuse of the 
powers of thought." 

"The personal opinions of the editors have no weight in the 
eyes of the public: what they seek in a newspaper is a knowl- 
edge of facts, and it is only by altering or distorting those facts 

' Edinburgh Review, October, 1840. 
^ "Democracy in America," p. 250. 
' Ibid; p. 237. 



1 68 AS OTHERS SEE US 

that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own 
views." * 

Yet the principle of freedom means to him so 
much that no hand should be laid upon this press. 

"The more I consider the independence of the press in its 
principal consequences, the more am I convinced that, in the 
modern world, it is the chief, and, so to speak, the constitutive 
element of liberty. A nation which is determined to remain 
free is therefore right in demanding, at any price, the exercise 
of this independence." ^ 

De Tocqueville's faith in liberty is not academic ; 
it is not merely a reasoned sentiment. It has in 
it something like a moral and religious trust. In 
spite of all that frightens him in the actual working 
of our institutions, his eye is steadily fixed upon the 
disciplinary value of an entire people exercising a 
free choice on all that determines their destinies. If 
the race is ever to be educated to self-government, 
it must be through the reaction of consequences of 
right and wrong acts. He speaks of "this perilous 
liberty," yet sees that already, as he compares us 
with Europe, the balance is on our side. It has great 
significance to him that while we have plenty of 
"factions," there was nowhere a sign of secret "con- 
spiracies" such as have been the bane of many 
aristocracies. Everything comes to the surface — 
coarseness, clamor, bad taste, vituperation; but 
that all this can come out is our safety. More than 
any one thing, in his opinion, universal suffrage will 

* "Democracy in America," p. 23S. ^ Ibid., p. 245. 



HIGHER CRITICISM 1 69 

protect us from the real perils of a factional spirit, 
as it will guard us from other perils. It has, for 
example, become a platitude that, in spite of all our 
frailties, great and threatening emergencies bring 
out the real character and strength of the people. 
In proof of this, de Tocqueville had but a fraction 
of the evidence to which we may now appeal, yet he 
writes this eloquent passage: — 

"But it is more common, both with nations and individuals, 
to find extraordinary virtues developed from the very immi- 
nence of the danger. Great characters are then brought into 
reHef, as the edifices which are usually concealed by the gloom 
of night are illuminated by the glare of a conflagration. At 
those dangerous times, genius no longer hesitates to come 
forward ; and the people, alarmed by the perils of their situa- 
tion, bury their envious passions in a short oblivion. Great 
names may then be drawn from the urn of election." ' 

It adds to the impressiveness of de Tocqueville's 
faith in our destinies that with all his continuous 
study of the United States until the time of his death, 
his confidence increased rather than diminished. 
Had he Hved to see the results of the Civil War, his 
most formidable fears would have disappeared. 
He could not help thinking of our States as little 
nations which would not hold together. They 
might still be democratic, but the territory was so 
vast and interests were so diverse, that all sorts of 
rivalries would break out to threaten the unity of the 
whole. *'If the sovereignty of the Union," he says, 
"were to engage in a struggle with that of the States, 

1 Ibid., p. 257. 



lyo AS OTHERS SEE US 

at the present day, its defeat may be confidently 
predicted." ^ He, of course, could not see at that 
date, how steam transportation on land and water 
was to bind these "little nations" into a unity of 
recognized interests capable of resisting any probable 
strain. 

Another misgiving was just as vain. Toward the 
close of the second volume, he reflects upon the 
chance of war. Would not the successful soldier 
seduce the imagination of democracy ? He writes : — 

"I foresee that all the military rulers who may rise up in 
great democratic nations will find it easier to conquer with 
their armies than to make their armies live at peace after 
conquest. There are two things which a democratic people 
will always find very difficult, — to begin a war and to end 
it:' ' 

These last words, "and to end it," have a strange 
sound as we remember what actually followed one 
of the most terrible conflicts in history: the rapid 
and peaceful return of armies North and South to 
their ordinary tasks. 

Just as little did he foresee certain evils that were 
even then beginning to appear. He could not be- 
lieve that we were to have great inequality of for- 
tunes. He could see no paupers, nor any tendency 
to produce them. The party system with the rise 
of the boss and the spoils to the victor did not disturb 
his imagination. He had no intimation of the 
astounding growth of great cities and their reaction 

^ "Democracy in America," p. 497. 
^ Ibid., p. 329. 



HIGHER CRITICISM I7I 

on our national life. He was very confident that 
we were safe from dangerous bribery because "there 
are so many to be bought." If he could have 
"listened ahead" a single generation, he might have 
heard a railroad magnate say, "There are too many 
to buy in the legislature, I prefer to deal with the 
Boss." ^ It is also strange to us that the office of 
the President seemed to him so feeble a thing, and 
likely to remain so. People talked to him of their 
respective States, not of the Nation. They were 
proud of the State, thought about it, read about it, 
and showed little interest in affairs at the Capitol. 
As the average citizen takes up the morning paper 
to-day, what is it that claims his attention? Does 
he look first at the politics of his State? Is it the 
affairs of the State that first touch his imagination, or 
does he turn to the great events which centre in and 
radiate from the National Capitol? To answer this 
is to mark one of the profoundest changes in our 
recent history. We shall see it take even more 
dramatic form as measured from Mr. Bryce's com- 
ment less than twenty-five years ago. 

If I were to summarize in a paragraph what seems 
to me of highest value in these volumes, it would be 
the revelation of the character and temper of the 
Author as he faces the thing called Democracy. 

' Ibid., p. 245. 

"Perhaps in democracies, the number of men who might be 
bought is not smaller, but buyers are rarely to be found; and, be- 
sides, it would be necessary to buy so many persons at once, that 
the attempt would be useless." — Ibid., p. 287. 



172 AS OTHERS SEE US 

He did not altogether like it. From some of its 
manifestations and some of its consequences he 
shrank. He did not, therefore, because of incidental 
evils, turn his back upon it or turn into that dreary 
nuisance, the chronic and petulant critic. There is 
a positive and constructive purpose in his sharpest 
thrusts. This high-born gentleman accepts without 
any fussy reserves the principle of self-government. 
The people and all the people are to learn the highest 
of all arts. They are to learn it through much 
suffering and through costly mistakes. Without 
one whining note, Alexis de Tocqueville took his 
part in the great discipline. So far as his example 
and precept count with men. Democracy is safe. 
Of the things threatening which he saw and prophe- 
sied, Bryce says : — 

"Of these clouds one rose till it covered the whole sky, 
broke in a thunderstorm and disappeared. Some have 
silently melted into the blue. Some still hang on the horizon, 
darkening large parts of the landscape." 

What these remaining shadows are we shall see 
in the chapter on his peer and successor, James 
Bryce. 



CHAPTER X 

OUR FRENCH VISITORS 

The first French books that follow the Revolution 
are full of geniality and even flattery. It was long 
the custom to quote these genuine aristocrats "who 
knew what manners were," as an offset to the snub- 
bing we received at the hands of the English writers. 

A good example of this extreme amiability is in 
three volumes of travels by Brissot de Warville. 
As so many of the early English confess that their 
object in coming was to discredit us, this young 
aristocrat comes to study our social and political 
conditions for a purpose which glowingly appears in 
his preface as follows : — 

"O Frenchmen, who wish for this valuable instruction, 
study the Americans of the present day. Open this book. 
You will see here to what degree of prosperity the blessings 
of freedom can elevate the industry of man; how they dignify 
his nature, and dispose him to universal fraternity. You will 
here learn by what means liberty is preserved ; that the great 
secret of its duration is in good morals. It is a truth that the 
observation of the present state of America demonstrates at 
every step. Thus you will see in these travels, the prodigious 
effect of hberty on morals, on industry, and on the ameliora- 
tion of men." 

173 



174 AS OTHERS SEE US 

He lands in Boston : — • 

"With what joy, my good friend, did I leap to this shore 
of Hberty ! . . . I flew from despotism, and came at last to 
enjoy the spectacle of liberty among a people where nature, 
education, and habit had engraved the equality of rights, 
which everywhere else is treated as a chimera. With what 
pleasure did I contemplate this town ! . . . I thought myself 
in that Salentum of which the lively pencil of Fenelon has left 
us so charming an image. But the prosperity of this new 
Salentum was not the work of one man, of King or Minister; 
it is the fruit of liberty, that mother of industry." 

The Bostonians unite simplicity of morals with 
that French politeness and delicacy of manners 
which renders virtue more amiable. They are 
hospitable to strangers and obliging to friends. 
They are tender husbands, fond and almost idolatrous 
parents, and kind masters. Also "neatness without 
luxury is a characteristic feature of this purity of 
manners; and this neatness is seen everywhere at 
Boston, in their dress, in their houses, and in their 
churches." 

Alas, this is not observation, it is rhapsody. It is 
in so high a strain that this courtly gentleman moved 
and spoke among us in those homespun days. There 
are recorded compliments in the same key by 
the Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. He 
says of the President's balls, that the "splendor 
of the rooms and the variety and richness of 
the dresses did not suffer in comparison with 
Europe." De la Rochefoucauld was much in 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS 1 75 

Philadelphia society, of whose assemblies he writes, 
"It is impossible to meet with what is called a plain 
woman." No suspicion attaches to this gallantry; 
but when Max O'Rell told us a few years ago that 
he travelled six months in the United States with- 
out seeing one plain woman, we remember that 
he was looking for lecture engagements.^ There is 
much of this benevolent myopia in the whole group 
of French critics during the entire generation that 
followed the Revolution. The French had helped 
us largely because of their intense hatred and fear 
of the English. The French became our literary 
champions as naturally as they defended us with 
their ships and arms. This impulse to vindicate 
us against the English shows itself as late as de 
Tocqueville. He finds American morals "very 
superior to their progenitors, the English." ^ 
Of the English abuse of our manners he says : ' — 

"The English make game of the manners of the Americans; 
but it is singular that most of the writers who have drawn these 
ludicrous delineations belonged themselves to the middle 
classes in England, to whom the same delineations are ex- 
ceedingly applicable; so that these pitiless censors furnish, 
for the most part, an example of the very thing they blame in 
the United States ; they do not perceive that they are deriding 
themselves to the great amusement of the aristocracy of their 
own country." 

* In " Jonathan and His Continent," p. 18. 
^ Vol. II, p. 249. 
^Ihid. 

So Sara Bernhardt, coming to fill her coffers, never lands in 
New York without assuring the American people through the re- 



176 AS OTHERS SEE US 

It is thus, with regret, that we have to put aside 
these first Gallic flatteries. They have precisely 
the same value as the ultra fault-finding of the 
English. They are neither more nor less to be 
trusted as important critics. De Tocqueville is 
not to be classed among these overzealous friends. 
He sets the note of the discriminating but sym- 
pathetic student which continues through Chevalier 
until our own day, when it has become a fashion 
among the French to make flying trips to this country. 
Too many of them begin to write on the steamer 
coming out ; take their first impressions as a finality, 
giving them literary form so rapidly that the book is 
on the Boulevards soon after their return. Even if 
the chapters totter with mistakes, they are likely to 
be more racily entertaining than English and German 
books of serious merit. 

One wonders, nevertheless, why so many of them 
should be destitute of the slightest critical values.^ 
I put this question to a professor of French in Har- 
vard College. He replied that "they either had no 
real knowledge of English, or knew it just enough to 
deceive them into thinking they knew it — which 
was worse." Not a few of these latter-day writers 
are so slovenly and inaccurate that they serve ad- 
mirably as books of humor. It is an ancient 

porters that "no country touches the heart like America." At her 
last landing, she delights in the increase of gracious and delicate 
manners. 

' The one exception in the most superficial of them is their 
comments on our theatre. 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS 177 

observation that the French care so little about 
other countries, that they rarely learn to spell cor- 
rectly the commonest names. There is such tenacity 
in this habit that it finally surprises the reader if 
now and then they get the word right. To avoid 
extremes, here, for instance, is a new book by a 
highly educated man who has been at least eight 
years in this country. He was given every chance 
to correct his proofs. A few of the spellings are 
these: "Lettery; New Hawen, Coan, for New 
Haven, Conn. ; Boss Crotker •, Tessenden for 
Fessenden; Cark Schurtz." Arnold's first name 
is now Mathew and then Matthew. Thus far the 
case is extremely mild, "My Uncle Tom's Cabin," 
"Long-Fellow" (by one who had visited the poet), 
"Athlantic Monthly"; the poor White House seri- 
ously turned into "Execution Mansion"; "Howard 
College," for Harvard; the City of Churches trans- 
formed into "Broakline"; the Nutmeg State into 
" Conettocutt," and "New Jersia," fairly represent 
the new spelling. "Teatotlar" is so often used that 
it obviously conveys the idea to the writer that tea 
was the adopted substitute for rum and thus gave 
the name to the party. "Washington Irwing," 
"Rock-Chair," "Wahash," for Wabash, "Huddson 
River," the "Poet Wittier," and proud Chicago tor- 
tured into "Chicorgua"; the Mohawk, "Mohuwek," 
and the "La cofoco party" are others in the same 
kind. These are a driblet in the main torrent of 
misspellings. Even present-day philosophers write 



lyS AS OTHERS SEE US 

"Williams" James. I had long believed that they 
were merely typographical errors, but there is authori- 
tative proof that they represent, for the most part, 
indifference or sheer carelessness of observation. 
The quality which helps account for this is stated 
with great frankness by M. Blouet (Max O'Rell) : ^ — 

"Ask the first hundred Frenchmen you meet in the streets 
of Paris what is the name of the president of the United States; 
you will find ninety-nine of them unable to tell you. The 
Frenchman is exclusive to the point of stupidity, and that 
which is not French possesses no interest for him." 

This is the stark provincialism for which Paris has 
long been noted. 

No small part of this literature is by journalists 
who have in mind the group of French readers for 
whom they write. To entertain Parisians by pretty 
paradoxes and lively drolleries is as exclusively their 
aim as it was the aim of Tom Moore to amuse the 
English diners-out. They often follow so nearly 
the same route, see so nearly the same objects, and 
make merry with the same characteristics, that each 
newcomer seems to have read the same books and to 
have taken instructions from the previous voyager. 
They drive to the Waldorf-Astoria, of which a minute 
pen-picture never fails. The device in the room 
by which one may order thirty things, few of which 
any one ever wants, divides their attention with 
ice-water and the price of cabs. The next step is 
to hunt up a restaurant which reminds them enough 

* "Jonathan and His Continent," p. 137. 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS 1 79 

of Paris to make life endurable. If the heaven of 
the Smart Set at Newport or elsewhere is open to 
them, the rest of the country grievously suffers. 
One feels this even in so brilliant a writer as Paul 
Bourget.^ The next dash (by way of Niagara) is for 
the West, where they struggle desperately with two 
phenomena — Chicago and the Cowboy. They 
are stunned by Chicago and the packing houses, but 
the Cowboy electrifies them. The return trip is sure 
to include the South for the sake of a chapter on the 
Negro problem. This dark enigma is the only dis- 
comfiture. They do not even make it interesting. 
There are at least twenty of these volumes from 
which one could remove the various and picturesque 
titles, replacing them by "A Whole Afternoon in the 
United States." Of some of them one would have 
to say that this half day was very ill spent. 

One Paris exquisite, whose object was clearly to 
create a sensation among his friends, lands in New 
York, but is so instantly undone by our rude ways, 
that he straightway returns to Paris. "7g n'ai pas 
pu supporter le coup'^ — it was too insufferable. 
This is far better than writing his book. He spared 
himself that trouble, and yet gave the shock of sur- 
prise and delight to his friends. 

Between this vivacious squad of journalists ^ and 

^ "Outre Mer," two volumes. It excites much curiosity, for in- 
stance, to know whether the lynching was really seen as described. 

^ Much better are two books, "Choses d'Amerique," by Max 
Leclaire, with an interesting discussion of Catholicism in the United 
States, and "La Femme aux Etats Unis," by M. C. de Varigny, in 



l8o AS OTHERS SEE US 

serious inquirers like Le Play, Carlier,* Claudio 
Janet, the Marquis de Rousier, and Madame Blanc ' 
the gap is like that between Brissot and de Tocque- 
ville. Le Play's pioneer work in sociology has de- 
veloped into an educational interest which has sent 

which we are told why women have become the equals of our men, 
"Flirt, amour, mariage," all get respectful attention. 

* A work of extraordinary learning is " La Republique Ameri- 
caine," by the French lawyer, Auguste Carlier. This savant came 
in 1855, stayed two years, and formed intimate relations with men 
like Sumner, Benton, Quincy, Ticknor, Everett, and Longfellow. 
His larger work in four stiff volumes, if not in the class of Bryce 
and de Tocqueville, is a profound study. He had before its pub- 
Hcation written a volume on Marriage in the United States, i860; 
one on Slavery two years later; two volumes on general history, 
especially in relation to the Indians, 1864; and still another, "The 
Acclimatization of Races in the United States," 1868. Nearly a 
quarter of a century was given to his crowning work, "The Ameri- 
can Republic." Carlier is very critical of de Tocqueville because 
of his taste for large and brilliant generalization, founded on what 
is thought to be insufficient evidence. He does not even let Mr. 
Bryce off without some strictures, chiefly because of the omissions 
in the "American Commonwealth." No further use is here made 
of Carlier because he is too exclusively for the student. The same 
must also be said of Le Play. 

^ A brilliant exception to this troup of travelling dilettanti is 
Madame Blanc, writing under the pseudonym of Th. Bentzon. She 
was several times in this country preparing carefully such studies 
as "Choses et Gens d'Amerique," "Recits Americains," "Ques- 
tions Americaines," "Femmes d'Amerique," and "Nouvelle 
France et Nouvelle Angleterre." She has an insistent purpose 
"to make my own people really see the Americans as they are." 
Writing for many years through the most distinguished literary 
organ, the Revue des Deux Monies, no one has done more than 
Madame Blanc to get some elementary notions about the large 
facts of American life into the French mind. 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS l8l 

US some of the most conscientious students that have 
ever come. Through the service of the Musee 
Social they are making the Ufe and institutions of 
this country known to France. Kenan's horror of 
everything American has given way to honest desires 
at least to understand the United States. 

From the dozen volumes that one would venture 
to recommend, I select a rather miscellaneous job- 
lot of observations that may do some critical service. 

There is first the intelligent recognition that one 
does not get into real touch with us until one learns 
that to see the American at all, he must be seen 
in several places. This sounds commonplace, but 
how many travellers realize it, or act upon it in their 
judgments? A Dutch jurist spent some months in 
this country at tasks which compelled him to visit 
business men in their offices in the pressure of the 
day's work. He said, " Until I went into their homes 
and saw them ofiF duty, I thought their manners 
outrageous. I was saved from stupid injustice by 
seeing them at their own tables and clubs." There 
is no class to which this does not apply. No per- 
spective is true about morals, manners, or achieve- 
ments that does not include several phases of the 
subject scrutinized. It is this same larger and more 
patient spirit in classifying impressions, upon which 
Le Play laid such emphasis, that enables de Rousier 
to read us a wholesome lesson. 

For a growing number of American families, 
there is excellent educational material in some of the 



1 82 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"shocks" which these gay Frenchmen suffer; as 
for instance, in that enduring superstition that the 
moral destiny of the family is really dependent upon 
rigid punctuality at a common and united breakfast 
table. 

A French scholar is staying with a well-to-do 
family in which no exigency of business or school 
appointments, no lack of domestic service or tyran- 
nous duties of the mistress could have been given as 
a reason, but because a daughter was ten minutes 
late for the seven o'clock breakfast, "the father 
showed great annoyance, which was all the more 
severe and disagreeable because he took on a high 
moral tone." 

The visitor finds it an iron law in that household 
that all members shall be as punctual as at military 
dress-parade. He asks innocently why seven people 
should be expected to march in on stroke of the 
clock. The inquiry occasions great surprise. The 
parental explanations leave him less than ever con- 
vinced that the custom is good for this type of family. 
It had already gone into his docket as an American 
superstition, when the young lady found some oppor- 
tunity to give her own exposition. "It is a super- 
stition and a very immoral one. It always starts 
the day wrong at least for two of us. You may 
wake people up at the same time, but you can't wake 
up their stomachs at the same time. I am hungry 
and therefore happy if I can eat at eight or nine or 
when I like, and I am glad to get my own breakfast. 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS 1 83 

With this wicked punctuahty, some of us are glum 
or irritable, and almost the only family unpleasant- 
ness we ever have can be traced straight to this 
seven o'clock breakfast." To this guest, the 
daughter's outburst came as a gleam of hope. He 
found us much too taciturn in our family life; 
far too little given to affectionate gaieties of com- 
mon conversation. 

The one step to help this, he thinks, is "to individ- 
ualize the breakfast ; to allow sleep, the great healer, 
to deal with each one after his needs." This hygienic 
freedom will restore and give such nice balance to 
the nerves that every one will be at his best. At the 
meal (lunch or dinner), all things will go trip- 
pingly because of this sagacious and humane 
reform. 

Many of the social troubles which we magnify are 
troubles, according to him, because as individuals 
we insist upon interpreting them solely by our tem- 
poral personal convenience. The employer com- 
plains of high wages and shortened hours, yet these 
are the very proofs of the industrial supremacy 
which these critics grant us. The mistress groans 
because the domestic is quick to leave ; but that she 
can leave, sure always of another place and, it may 
be, a higher wage, is precisely what marks the 
economic advantage of the country. That com- 
munity leads which gives opportunity to the largest 
number of its population. That opportunity is 
here open to those classes which are elsewhere 



184 AS OTHERS SEE US 

narrowly held by custom, is the very sign of that 
progress which includes the nation as a whole. 

It is, I think, de Rousier who expresses the 
humorous surprise that our democracy should have 
become the happy hunting-ground of the European 
nobility. As their rents fall and their castles decay ; 
as the external symbols of class distinction become 
top costly to maintain, what happier resource have 
these titled pets than to save themselves at the ex- 
pense of the well -dowered American girl? "Is your 
democracy," asked one visitor, "to be the chief 
protector and preserver of these man-made inequali- 
ties in Europe?" 

It is full of interest to hear a Catholic scholar 
speculate with great open-mindedness upon the 
differences in the French and American ideals of 
the young woman's education. After many visits 
to the American schools he thus states his case : — 

"The difference is revolutionary. We in France assume 
with our young women that they are to marry and live the 
family life. All our conceptions of the girl's training are con- 
sciously adjusted to this thought. The American ideal seems, 
on the other hand, to assume that the girl is to have a life of 
her own; that she is to be economically independent and 
make her way, marriage or no marriage." 

If the family were to suffer from this, he sees in 
that fact the condemnation of this education in the 
United States. He is not convinced that this evil 
is to be feared, because of the indications that this 
very economic independence, with its enlarged 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS 1 85 

freedom, may result in a sexual selection of a type 
that will secure better offspring and even a happier 
marriage. "The girl that is independent enough to 
refuse the man who can only offer economic support 
may later have her reward in the husband that nature 
means for her." This is like Jules Huret's discovery 
that the larger life opened to the American woman 
has made her so much nearer an intellectual mate of 
her husband that the offspring and society at large 
reap the advantage. The net energy and initiative 
of the country seem to him largely accounted for 
by this wider field of woman's activity. 

Another reflection on our education, especially in 
the earlier grades, is that the imagination, the sense 
of mystery and of reverence, suffer much from our 
too positive methods. "Information and the fact" 
are thought to hold such sway in our schools that 
the more delicate qualities of mind and heart are 
hardened in the process. One of these writers ^ 
has a very penetrating passage upon this point. 
He says our education allows far too little for the 
unconscious resources in the young. He is sorry 
to find in the youth at school so little of the naive, 
so little timidity, deference, and even awkwardness. 
He would see more capacity to blush, more "credu- 
lous simplicity" and less aggressive, conscious inten- 
sity. He gives this as one reason why many of our 
finest men of poetic and unworldly nature have such 

1 Paul Bourget, "Outre Mer," Vol. II, p. 135. 



1 86 AS OTHERS SEE US 

slight influence in the nation; — because ''cette vie 
est trop voluntaire, trop consciente, trop intensive,''^ 

It is this brilHant writer who turns many a neat 
phrase against us because of our lack of "/a mesure^ 
Balance, perspective, proportion in our thinking and 
in that which thought expresses, he finds deplorably 
lacking in our inner and outer life. This evil is so 
inherent that nothing escapes it. Our architecture 
and theatre have as little harmony as our inner 
estimates of the spiritual values of life. We have 
a craze to count in vast numbers ; cannot, he says, 
even show our new houses to strangers without 
insisting that they look into every room, toilet and 
linen closets included. The bulk of the Sunday 
papers is a fatal sign of this disease of "too much- 
ness." Reckless as to quality, the editor reckons 
well on his public by supplying a huge and promis- 
cuous mass of print and pictures. Our houses are 
stuffed too full of ornament, too much is upon walls 
and tables. Roses, like the American Beauty, 
swaggering on stems four feet long, and the modest 
violet packed into bouquets that would fill the wash 
bowl; the length of the dinner, the amount of food 
and the waste connected with it; the height of the 
skyscraper; the "barbarous over-ornamenting of 
the Pullman car" and the last new hotel; the reck- 
less speeding of specially advertised trains, are one 
and all unpleasant hints to this philosophic critic 
of our lack of "/a mesure." We are the most 
hospitable of people, yet cannot resist overdoing it 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS 187 

for those whom we specially care to entertain, and 
thus over all is this trail of the serpent — exaggera- 
tion. 

"We cannot deny this altogether, but it is fair to 
reply that the standard which he sets us — harmony 
and proportion for the inner and the outer life — 
is the highest and most difficult that ever was or 
can be applied to a race. We have been told often 
enough that only the Greeks at their highest mo- 
ment ever greatly approached its realization. Before 
this supreme test, no nation would go without 
whipping. The baby act, however, we will not play. 
The fault, beyond doubt, lies against us. Exaggera- 
tion and lack of "measure^^ are like a taint in the 
blood of our civilization. 

Still, these fastidious connoisseurs leave us one 
crumb of comfort. As we saw a change and soften- 
ing of tone in the English criticism, so in the French. 
Their most persuasive and confident strictures 
against us naturally concerned the realm of art. 
There is no relenting about our theatre. For our 
stage, their shafts still bear the poisoned tip. But 
architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, win 
most gracious praises from recent French guests.^ 
Paul Adam,^ in a recent volume of much charm, is 
unhesitating in his admiration for "the emerging 

* M. Alfred D'Almbert, a half century ago, in his "Flanerie 
Parisienne," thinks it very clever to announce a chapter on the 
Beaux Arts en Amerique. As you turn the leaf you come upon 
a blank unprinted space. 

^ "Vues d' Amerique," Paris, 1906. 



I»5 AS OTHERS SEE US 

best" in these arts. Sargent has " incontestable mas- 
tery." We have ''excellent art instruction." John 
La Farge is among the really great, and ''la grande 
simplicite^' of Saint Gaudens' figures is full of 
power and genius. In much of our sculpture there 
is "excellent technique." He says we have become 
the great art buyers of the world and that our rich 
men use their dollars far better than the rich men of 
France. He roundly says to the Latin people that 
they should be made to understand that the spirit of 
art "has definitely penetrated the soul of the Yan- 
kees." "Europe must look out if she would keep 
her supremacy in art." It is not less complimentary 
that he interprets much of our higher life through the 
philosophy of William James. Here, too, is a great 
artist whose thought fascinates him like the grand 
lines of the Lincoln statue. 

In the genial book of the Catholic Professor, 
Abbe Klein,^ we have an abandonment of appre- 
ciation for the spiritual tolerance which seems to 
that writer a sure solvent for many gritty obstacles, 
not alone on our shores, but for the future of a much 

* "Au Pays de la Vie Intense." Though we say these things 
ourselves, it is more quickening to hear a large-minded French 
Catholic thinking aloud about the niggardly uses to which the great 
average of Protestant churches are put. That such a vast equip- 
ment throughout the land should have a leisurely Sunday morning 
opening with a possible prayer-meeting in the week, and then be 
locked tight as in fear of thieves! He finds multitudes of these 
costly structures used hardly more than half the hours of a single 
day during the entire week. 



OUR FRENCH VISITORS 1 89 

larger world in which the races must more and more 
live as in one common country. 

There are few exceptions to the blank bewilder- 
ment of the abler French reporters, that the negro 
should excite the excess of feeling which they find 
in the North and South alike. This surprise is not 
in the least confined to those who have had no con- 
tact with the African and can therefore be said to 
know nothing about him. It is the same astonish- 
ment that the present Governor- General of Jamaica 
expresses. He has had long and intimate relations 
with negroes in various administrative capacities. 
That we should so incessantly talk about it ; that we 
should so force the issue into the fierce light of 
controversy and debate; that reticence and self- 
control should be so rare, are what appear to him 
among the least excusable causes of the trouble. 
We act, he says, as if we were set upon creating two 
or three times as many difficulties as there are. 

This is the tone of the most intelligent French 
observers. "If it is an uneasy ghost," asks one, 
''why can the Americans give it no rest? Why 
must they always assume that the hair by which the 
sword hangs is so soon to snap ? Why do they shout 
so loudly that it must snap?" He is told by many 
best people in the South, that if the tongue of the 
politician should.be struck by temporary paralysis 
whenever he appeals to this race feeling, the greatest 
obstacle to race improvement would be removed. 

These sins appear to him, however, slight as com- 



IQO AS OTHERS SEE US 

pared to the "magnificent abandon" with which 
North and South alike are giving themselves to the 
education of the colored race. And thus we pass 
from the unchecked elation of Brissot at the closing 
of the eighteenth century to the more discriminating 
cordiality of these last writers who find it w^orth while 
to see us at our best rather than at our worst. 



CHAPTER XI 

DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 

That democracy is to deprive social relations of all 
delicacy and charm, is either taken for granted by 
many of the older critics, or they attempt to prove 
it by elaborate illustrations. "Democracy every- 
where," says one, "has no soft words, no suppleness 
of forms; it has little address, little of management; 
it is apt to confound moderation with weakness, 
violence with heroism." As a democracy must be 
built up through trade and commerce in which the 
entire people takes part, no class remains to teach 
manners to the busy masses. This filled many of 
our observers with anxiety. If all must earn their 
own livelihood, how could they ever attain the ease 
and refinement of good behavior? 

That those who produce the wealth upon which 
all must live could ever learn the gentilities in and 
through their work was not to be thought of. Enough 
of this has nevertheless come to pass that we see 
something of these rare values slowly emerging from 
the very jaws of the industrial monster. We have 
begun to see that manners are an excellent business 
asset. As business has lost its isolated and individual 
character; as it has come more and more to depend 

191 






192 AS OTHERS SEE US 

upon associated and corporate forms; in a word, 
as it becomes socialized, manners in the larger sense 
rise in value. To manage large bodies of men has 
come to require the kind of knowledge that includes 
manners of some sort. As for the general public 
and the greater corporations that depend upon its 
good-will, manners are coming to rank with ability. 
We have now to supplement the familiar formula 
"land, labor, and ability" by land, labor, ability 
and manners. 

It was this larger use of the word that President 
Hadley had in mind when he said, "A large part of 
the railroad difficulties could be settled simply by 
good manners." That noble citizen, W. J. Baldwin, 
Jr., was also thinking of railroad problems when he 
said, "We shall be in hot water until we train up a 
set of men who know how to behave to each other 
and to the public." It has long been evident that 
a large part of our labor troubles spring from a lack 
of manners if the word is used in its larger sense. 
The best work brought about by arbitration has 
been through devices which enable the good manners 
of those most concerned to get effective expression. 
An American business man many years in Mexico 
gave this bit of his own history : — 

"I was for months checked in my plans because I knew 
nothing of Mexican manners. My letters, my calls, my busi- 
ness propositions all seemed to freeze up the men with whom 
I wished to do business. A friendly Mexican to whom I 
appealed for help told me I was too abrupt. ' They don't 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 1 93 

understand you any better than you understand them. You 
must make a formal call and a leisurely one, before you say 
a word about your business proposition. You are beginning 
to use the telephone, but you offend people by not spending a 
minute first in careful inquiries as to health, etc' Then he 
showed me all the flourishes that must adorn my letters, and 
slowly, and with great loss of time, I got on to a perfectly 
friendly footing with my Mexicans." 

This common ignorance of customs and traditions 
among another people accounts for a part at least of 
this sad tangle over the question of manners. A 
certain rare and occasional type of visitor brings the 
gift ; — is it knowledge, imagination, sympathy, or 
a unifying of all these ? — a gift at any rate which 
carries its happy possessor through every vexation 
of the journey, apparently without discerning that 
anybody has bad manners. 

Almost exactly one hundred years ago John Brad- 
bury, F.L.S., travelled one thousand miles in the 
United States. In his own words, he "never met 
with the least incivility or affront." We see the 
reason for this in a warning he gives to travellers 
from Europe. They must first understand the 
character of the society to which they come, especially 
if they have been in the habit of treating servants 
haughtily. "Let no one (in the United States) 
indulge himself in abusing the waiter or hostler at 
the inn," for these feel that they are citizens and are 
performing useful work.^ De Tocqueville is, ex- 
cept now and then, just as philosophical. Even 

* "Travels in 1809, 10, and 11," Liverpool, 1817, p. 355. 
o 



194 AS OTHERS SEE US 

very ungracious differences in behavior interest 
him : — 

"There are many little attentions which an American does 
not care about ; he thinks they are not due him, or he presumes 
that they are not known to be due ; he therefore either does not 
perceive a rudeness, or he forgives it ; his manners become less 
courteous, and his character more plain and mascuHne." ^ 

With the large majority of these early travellers, 
our manners find no favor. Isaac Weld gives about 
the average acidity to his summary, " Civility cannot 
be purchased from them on any terms; they seem 
to think that it is incompatible with freedom." ^ 
Even the great ones discipline us, especially when 
we are caught out of our own country. In Lock- 
hart's "Life of Scott," we find the great story-teller 
thus commenting on the Americans that sought 
him out, "They are as yet rude in their ideas of 
social intercourse, and totally ignorant, speaking 
generally, of all the art of good breeding, which 
consists chiefly in a postponement of one's own petty 
wishes or comforts to those of others. By rude 
questions and observations, an absolute disrespect 
to other people's feelings, and a ready indulgence of 
their own, they make one feverish in their company, 
though perhaps you may be ashamed to confess." 
This is mildly spoken compared to Tennyson's 
outburst against the steady stream of Americans 
that tried year after year to waylay him in and about 

' "Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 209. 
' "Travels," p. 37. 




Harriet Martineau 
Author of " Society in America " 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS I95 

his home by the sea. Another benignant English- 
man says the first thing an American does, when he 
arrives at a London hotel, is to demonstrate his 
inferiority to the waiters. He is so ignorant of the 
fine art of tipping, that he gives a shilling where he 
should give a penny, and to the man who should 
get twopenny he donates two shillings. "The 
consequence is that he is always in difficulties." 
The growing insolence of English waiters he attrib- 
utes wholly to the low-bred familiarity of the Ameri- 
can tourists ! This Londoner says it is a common 
sight to see the entire business of a restaurant cease 
while the man from Indiana loudly disputes the 
extra price charged for bread, because "out in 
Indiana they do not have such charges. Everybody 
can have all the bread he w^ants. It's thrown in." 

"Why," asks the English journalist, "is the Ameri- 
can so well behaved at home, but such a consuming 
terror in Europe?" He was given the well-worn 
answer. " The noisy or conspicuously silly American 
fixes attention upon himself. You English do not 
notice the far greater number of quiet and decent 
people for the very reason that they are w-ell be- 
haved." The American then asked, "Why can't 
you understand that some millions of people in the 
United States have the travelling habit; that thou- 
sands of them, from the humblest origin, go to Europe 
as soon as they get money enough. In no country 
in the world does this class sacrifice to see the world, 
often with their families, as do Americans. That 



196 AS OTHERS SEE US 

among these, large numbers should make themselves 
officious and disagreeable is inevitable." This is 
true, but it is also inevitable that a very small minor- 
ity of loud and objectionable folk, from any country, 
should set a common stamp on the entire people. 
Again and again, we see in our critics that they 
brought with them the idea of our manners from 
what they had already observed of American be- 
havior in Europe. 

We have good evidence that this offensive chip- 
on-the-shoulder attitude has disappeared from some 
classes of Americans. But for our continued sham- 
ing, a noisy and undisciplined contingent carries 
on the work of discrediting our country. On ship, 
in miscellaneous hotels and pensions in Europe, this 
plague still rages. A veteran conductor of Ameri- 
cans through Europe says, "I have my chief trouble 
with this infernal lugging of America along with 
them. I practically never get a party without some 
few who stir up bad blood by loud talk about 'the 
way we do things in the United States,' and the 
women are as bad as the men. The Italians and 
Swiss are good-natured about it ; the English despise 
it, and if they can, avoid us altogether; the French 
shrug their shoulders and say, ' What can you expect ? 
they are Americans.'" He adds, "I have often seen 
both French and English, when inquiring for rooms 
at pensions or small hotels, turn away upon learning 
that Americans were there." 

An American who had to spend some years in 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS I97 

Italy admits that he changed his pension three times 
because he couldn't stand "so many kinds of brag- 
ging about his country. Four out of five of us can 
hold our own in decent behavior with other national- 
ities, but there is always that awful fifth to make 
mischief." In one pension from which he felt him- 
self driven he says, a mother came with her three 
grown daughters. On their first entrance into the 
parlor in wliich several persons were reading or 
writing, one of the daughters said, as if no one were 
in the room, " Did you ever see such absurd ways of 
heating a house? It's almost as bad as those stuffy 
English grates. Why, in America — " "I didn't 
stop for the rest of the sentence, I hurried out to find 
some place where I should be free from this most 
intolerable way of making ourselves disagreeable on 
our travels." 

Our task is, however, with that larger general 
public of which our critics are mostly writing. Espe- 
cially in the first half of the century they rarely 
attempt any discrimination among different kinds 
of Americans. A French lecturer says, "He (the 
American) would be afraid of lowering himself by 
being polite. In his eyes politeness is a form of 
servility, and he imagines that, by being rude to 
well-bred people, he puts himself on a footing with 
them, and carries out the greatest principle of democ- 
racy, equality." ^ For more than half a century, we 

' " Jonathan and His Continent," p. 278. 

Hamerton speaks of certain classes among the Scots who 



198 AS OTHERS SEE US 

get almost unbroken chastisement, especially from 
the English. The French so far champion us as 
to say that, of all people, the English have the 
least qualification as instructors or censors of man- 
ners. But as this French view may arise from 
envy of the English, we will not take advantage 
of it. 

It is, nevertheless, very vital to know as much as 
possible about the temper and idiosyncrasies of the 
critic. I have seen a good many Germans in that 
country (especially men classically trained) who had 
come to the United States, but for some reason failed 
to win their way. They returned embittered to the 
Fatherland. Henceforth it was a vocation to abuse 
American character and manners. But the root of 
this abuse was in their own remembered disappoint- 
ment. If we add to causes like these, all sorts of 
personal bias, misadventure and injured vanities, 
we shall account for a good deal of the harsher 
comment on our manners. 

There is no better illustration than Mrs. TroUope, 
who is selected because our manners were her special 
theme. It was these which gave the title to her book. 
Wherever she journeys, her eye seeks evidence of 
our ill breeding. She was standing by General 
Jackson when a good American thus accosted 
him: — 

show "a sort of repugnance to polish of manner, as if it were an 
unmanly dandyism, a feeling that answers to a plain man's dis- 
like of jewellery and fine clothes." 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 199 

"'General Jackson, I guess?' 

"The General bowed assent. 

"'Why, they told me you was dead.' 

"'No! Providence has hitherto preserved my life.' 

"'And is your wife alive, too?' 

"The General, apparently much hurt, signified the con- 
trary, upon which the courtier concluded his harangue by 
saying, 'Ay, I thought it was one or the t'other of ye.'" ' 

She says, "The total and universal want of man- 
ners, both in males and females, is so remarkable 
that I was constantly endeavoring to account for 
it." ^ She is telling the truth for the most part, but 
she needs one correction. We are quite certain 
that her own peculiarities were so unyieldingly- 
different from those among whom she lived, as to 
be a constant irritant. She was sturdily "sot" in 
her English ways; was very brusque and could not 
adapt herself to the life about her. She wishes 
to hire a domestic "by the year," as she did in Eng- 
land. She thinks it very absurd to hire by the month. 
The custom should be corrected ; but she gets this 
response from the astonished maiden : — 

/—'"Oh Gimini!" exclaimed the damsel, with a loud laugh, 
"you be a downright Englisher, sure enough. I should like 
to see a young lady engage by the year in America ! I hope I 
shall get a husband before many months, or I expect I shall 
be an outright old maid, for I be most seventeen already." 

That the ways of men were rough and uncouth 
among the average folk with whom she had to do 
was as natural, at that time, as that pigs should run 
^ Page 201. ^ Page 64. 



200 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in the streets, roads should be bad, houses built 
"like shells," and that there should be "a deplorable 
lack of sidewalks." We have to take her own 
conduct into account because manners are not alone 
an affair of the individual, they are a social relation. 
When Captain Marryat, who follows Mrs. TroUope, 
finds a group of Americans, jolly and companionable, 
it throws even more light on him than on the Ameri- 
cans. It is instant proof that the jovial author of 
"Peter Simple" was himself a lover of good fellow- 
ship; that he could "mix" with any company. 
This is a human approach that creates its own 
response. 
Alexander Mackay, a few years later, says : — 

"An American can be as reserved as anybody else, when he 
comes in contact with one he does not understand, or who will 
not understand him — and this is the reason why so many 
travellers in America, who forget to leave their European no- 
tions of exclusiveness at home, and traverse the republic 
wrapped in the cloak of European formalism, find the Ameri- 
cans so cold in their demeanor, and erroneously regard their 
particular conduct to themselves as the result of a general 
moodiness and reserve." ^ 

This explains Mackay's temperamental equip- 
ment as a traveller. He will not insist upon hiring 
a domestic by the year, if that is not the custom. 
He will not insist upon the same ^ vocal intonation 
or openly rejoice, as one of his friends did, that our 
Hall of Representatives at Washington was perfect 

* Page 126. 

^ "The Western World," 1846, p. 126. See also p. 283. 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 20I 

because you couldn't hear a word that was spoken in 
it. One Frenchman never sees a pubHc official that 
was not coarse and brutal in his manners. Without 
defending all our officials, we yet know that about 
this same Frenchman there were peculiarities which, 
if we knew them, would qualify his sweeping judg- 
ment. 

De Tocqueville, for example, shows us as in a 
mirror, in this little paragraph, what kind of a 
"mixer" he was: "A public officer in the United 
States is uniformly simple in his manners, accessible 
to all the world, attentive to all requests, and obliging 
in his replies." ^ 

Sir James Caird was sent to this country by the 
English Government to report on the feeling of our 
people after the affair of the Alabama. He told me 
that on one of our trains he thought he had lost some 
luggage. He sent for the conductor, saying to him 
rather gruffly that his luggage must be looked up. 
"I assumed," said Sir James, "that your conductors 
were like the 'guards' on an English train. I at 
once found out my error. The tall Yankee took 
out his glasses and looked down at me with great de- 
liberation, saying finally, 'Who in are you?' I 

lost my temper, saying to him that I was a ' member 
of Parliament, commissioned by my government,' 
etc., etc. To all of which the tall Yankee listened 
grimly till I had finished. He then said, as if 
examining a specimen, 'Well — I'll be , if you 

^ "Democracy in America," Vol. I, p. 263. 



202 AS OTHERS SEE US 

don't look just as I expected a member of Parliament 
to look. Good day.' He returned in a moment 
and said, 'If you go and ask the baggagemaster, 
perhaps he'll look after your trunk.'" Sir James 
added that he had never known before what degree 
of rage he was capable of. After some days he 
learned that the conductor was rather like the cap- 
tain of a steamer and in no way like the guard of 
an English train, "I finally saw that I had made a 
fool of myself and after that never had the slightest 
trouble." This kindly English gentleman could, 
of course, have had that same circus every day of 
his stay in the United States, if he had not dropped 
that tone and air. His own misreckoning created 
the situation, just as thousands of Americans in 
Europe create all sorts of awkwardnesses and ill- 
feeling because in some moment of misunderstand- 
ing they have no key to the situation. They are in 
unwonted conditions where they have not learned 
the human approach. 

As jovial a nature as Dickens certainly had not 
learned it on his first journey to this country. He 
had a great weakness for playing the dandy in his 
dress. He was much bejewelled and we have only 
to picture him, with his buttonhole bouquet, walking 
about in a town of the Mississippi valley in 1842. 
Every ultra effect of his person was bound to create 
among those rustics all manner of "impertinent 
curiosities." The gods could not have protected 
him. When, on his second trip, he said nothing 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 203 

would induce him to write another book, we see 
that he had learned something. Even so little a 
thing as the single eye-glass of Sir Charles Lyell 
explains some of the irreverent remarks that he did 
not like in that Western world. 

Difficult as it is, there must be some understanding 
as to what is meant by manners. Renan says that 
no fact weighs so much in our human relations as 
manner. He is not asserting that manners are the 
highest or best in character, but that they practically 
count for more than other gifts among men. This 
has no more emphasis than in Emerson, who says 
that "the creation of the gentleman" is the most 
conspicuous fact in modern history. "Chivalry 
is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature, 
half the drama and all the novels from Sir Philip 
Sidney to Sir Walter Scott paint this figure." As 
we face the many charges that American manners 
are bad, what standard are we to have in mind? 
Has any nation as a whole good manners? We 
hear this said of some Eastern peoples, but in our 
Western world, are German or French or English 
manners good as totals of behavior? Or must we 
deal with a selected class or classes in each nation? 
We should find in every class in all of those countries 
gracious and most ungracious manners. In each 
community we should have to do with individuals. 
It is not unlikely that many more persons deserving 
the name of gentleman or lady, would be found in 
one nation than in another. But the question in 



204 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Europe as well as in the United States will be one of 
ratios. The general statement that American man- 
ners are bad is like saying, "the American is fat or 
temperate, or easily embarrassed." I heard an 
Englishman in London, who did not like us, say that 
he never failed to spot an American, because he had 
"a. wolf's face." I saw what he meant, but he was 
depicting only a portion of his enemies. That 
Europeans knocking about among our loosely settled 
communities, as did Fearon, the two Halls, and 
scores of others, should be concerned about our lack 
of manners, is like their solicitude over our want 
of cathedrals, castles, and good pictures. The slow 
reaching out of our people toward the West with 
all the burdens and hardships incident to pioneer 
life, was no school for outward graces. Our popular 
conception of liberty and equality unquestionably 
added its touch of swagger to much of our 
behavior. The hat -in-hand deference observable 
among common folk in many parts of Europe could 
not thrive in our atmosphere. That deference was 
made in older countries by all sorts of forced sub- 
serviency. It is sweet to those who receive it, and 
we often hear among us a toadying valuation set 
upon the obsequious and bated homage of foreign 
servants. This is called good manners. It is 
said, they "know their places." But we cannot 
continue to have those masks, and at the same time 
have the best social manners. 

As most of the early attacks on our ill-bred ways 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 20$ 

ascribe them to democracy and equality, this charge 
especially has to be met. There is happily illustrious 
authority to which we may appeal. As great a man 
as Goethe declared that really good manners could 
only come with equality; not an inane literal 
equality, but an equality of native and achieved 
power; a social ranking according to social service, 
without any artificial aid of class flunkeyism. Many 
of the earliest critics insist that our theories of equality 
spoil manners. Our imperfections were very real, but 
they were not owing to any theory of equality, unless 
blatant exceptions here and there are to decide. We 
can appeal to the very highest authorities for this. 
In respect to our manner, James Bryce says, 
"Americans have gained more than they have lost by 
equality." ^ Then follows this admirable passage : — 

"I do not think that the upper class loses in grace, I am 
sure that the humbler class gains in independence. The man- 
ners of the * best people ' are exactly those of England, with a 
thought more of consideration towards inferiors and of frank- 
ness towards equals. Among the masses there is, generally 
speaking, as much real courtesy and good nature as anywhere 
else in the world. There is less outward politeness than in 
some parts of Europe, Portugal, for instance, or Tuscany, or 
Sweden. There is a certain coolness or offhandness which at 
first annoys the European visitor, who still thinks himself 'a 
superior'; but when he perceives that it is not meant for inso- 
lence, and that native Americans do not notice it, he learns to 
acquiesce." ^ 

' "American Commonwealth," p. 609. 

^ See de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 214. 
De Tocqueville puts this in more theoretic form: "The more equal 



2o6 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"The second charm of American Hfe is one which some 
Europeans will smile at. It is social equality. To many- 
Europeans — to Germans, let us say, or Englishmen — the 
word has an odious sound. It suggests a dirty fellow in a 
blouse elbowing his betters in a crowd, or an ill-conditioned 
villager shaking his fist at the parson or the squire ; or, at any 
rate, it suggests obtrusiveness and bad manners. The exact 
contrary is the truth. Equality improves manners, for it 
strengthens the basis of all good manners, respect for other 
men and women simply as men and women, irrespective of 
their station in life." 

Mr. Bryce admits that forty years ago the influence 
of equahty may have impaired manners, but denies 
that this is any longer true. He says : — 

"In those days there was an obtrusive self-assertiveness, 
among the less refined classes, especially towards those who, 
coming from the Old World, were assumed to come in a pat- 
ronizing spirit. Now, however, social equality has grown so 
naturally out of the circumstances of the country, has been 
so long established, and is so ungrudgingly admitted, that all 
excuse for obtrusiveness has disappeared. People meet on a 
simple and natural footing, with more frankness and ease 
than is possible in countries where every one is either looking 
up or looking down." * 

social conditions become, the more do men display this reciprocal 
disposition to oblige each other. In democracies, no great bene- 
fits are conferred, but good offices are constantly rendered; a man 
seldom displays self-devotion, but all men are ready to be of service 
to one another." 

* Sir Charles Lyell on his later visit is struck by the advantage 
which the United States has over England in allowing men to take 
humbler business positions with no loss of social prestige. So 
many "younger sons" are driven from England by "aristocratic 
prejudice" as to what is genteel. — "North America," Vol. I, 

p. 20. 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 207 

The spirit of all this accords with Hamerton's 
judgment that the French are "at once a very pohte 
and a very rude people." He says the uses to which 
the upper class put their politeness is to defend them- 
selves against the intimacies of people whom they 
do not want to laiow. He says his own countrymen, 
the English, do not care in the least about a reputa- 
tion for politeness. They defend themselves against 
intimacies by ^'roideur and dignity." ^ 

That democracy is to deform all life's graces is a 
kind of faith with the older writers. The most unre- 
lated annoyance is sure to be traced to this source 
or to some supposed derivative, as for example, 
"woman's rights." That charming story-teller, 
Anthony TroUope, has his fling in this passage : — 

"The woman, as she enters, drags after her a misshapen, 
dirty mass of battered wirework, which she calls her crinoline, 
and which adds as much to her grace and comfort as a log of 
wood does to a donkey, when tied to the animal's leg in a 

' The French novelist, Marcel Prevost, writes an article in the 
Figaro on the English in which he says: "I should not belong to a 
Latin race if, in view of all this, I did not venture to compare our- 
selves with these conquerors. I find them less intelligent, less 
really cultivated than ourselves ; less cultivated and less laborious 
than the Germans. Nevertheless it is not the Germans, and it is 
certainly not ourselves, who, nowadays, give the world its rules of 
life. It is the English who do so. In a different order of things, 
but in an equal measure, they exercise upon the manners of the 
world the measure of authority which the French exercised in the 
eighteenth century. 

"The English are now almost the sole people who have really 
national manners." He also finds the English, whom he calls 
"The Conquerors," more "adaptable" than the French. 



2o8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

paddock. Of this she takes much heed, not managing it so 
that it may be conveyed up to the carriage with some decency, 
but striking it about against men's legs, and heaving it with 
violence over people's knees. The touch of a real woman's 
dress is in itself delicate; but these blows from a harpy's fins 
are loathsome. If there be two of them, they talk loudly 
together, having a theory that modesty has been put out of 
court by women's rights." 

De Tocqueville, in his chapter on the Relation of 
Democracy to Manners, says, "EquaUty of condi- 
tions and greater mildness in manners are, then, in 
my eyes not only contemporaneous occurrences, but 
correlative facts." ^ He opens the chapter with 
these words, "We perceive that for several centuries 
social conditions have tended to equality, and we 
discover that at the same time the manners of society 
have been softened," 

Matthew Arnold deserves a place among these 
witnesses of the higher rank. In his "Impressions 
of America," this prince of critics pays merciless 
attention to some of our limitations and vulgarities. 
He does it in a tone of too much conscious ascendency 
over our poor humanity. This often rasps the soul. 
But no book ever written about us has, it seems to 
me, more truth that we need to know, packed into 
small space, like gold in the vein, than this little 
volume. Note the reason he gives why some of our 
women have better manners than English women 
of the same class. 

• "Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 198. 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 209 

"I have often heard it observed that a perfectly natural man- 
ner is as rare among English women of the middle classes as it 
is general among American women of like condition with 
them. And so far as the observation is true, the reason of its 
truth no doubt is, that the English woman is living in presence 
of an upper class, as it is called — in presence, that is, of a 
class of women recognized as being the right thing in style and 
manner, and whom she imagines criticising her style and man- 
ner, finding this or that to be amiss with it, this or that to be 
vulgar. Hence, self-consciousness and constraint in her. 
The American woman lives in presence of no such class ; there 
may be circles trying to pass themselves off as such a class, 
giving themselves airs as such, but they command no recog- 
nition, no authority." 

I do not quote this because of the tribute in it, 
but to show his spirit toward manners as related to 
organized social snobbery. The manners that come 
from class subserviency we do not want. Even if 
long in the making, we desire the deportment that 
is not "humbled into shape" by artificial class 
distinctions. 

To put this demeanor into a word or definition is 
at least as hard as to define religion. The paragon 
of manners would have that first indispensable 
requisite — delicate consideration of the feelings of 
other people. He would also have the graces of 
external carriage and behavior. If he were the 
paragon, he would show these gifts of sensitive 
regard to others, clothed in the outer charms of 
bearing, at all times and to all sorts of people. He 
would not show them in spots or upon occasion only. 
The Germans speak of " a street angel and a home 



2IO AS OTHERS SEE US 

devil" — a man very popular in public, but a churl 
in his own family. In one of Cherbuliez's novels 
some swell of noble lineage is made mayor of his 
commune. A lot of miscellaneous citizens come to 
him with a request. He stands before them with 
the polished and smiling exterior moulded by his 
traditions. But while they are petitioning, the 
Mayor says to himself, " I wonder what this vul- 
gar mob would think, if they could look into my 
mind and see, this minute, just how I am despising 
them?" This is the cad, yet he was some percent- 
age of a gentleman. He had still the lacquered 
shell. 

I was once on a very trying stage drive of several 
days in the West. More passengers than could be 
decently accommodated had to get through. A 
woman of the party had won every heart at the 
journey's end by a kindness and tact which prevented 
minor quarrels over the most desirable seats or 
rooms at the hotel. It was all done with entire 
unconsciousness. Yet she would openly chew gum 
by the hour, use the knife long and industriously 
upon her finger-nails, and, after each meal, elabo- 
rately remove the food from her teeth with her hat- 
pin. One of the party, who would not speak to her 
on the first day, said at the end, "That is the most 
naturally kind person I ever saw. She carried us 
in her heart the whole way." 

What are we to do between the French mayor 
with the human feeling all gone, and this woman 



DEMOCRACY AND MANNERS 2TI 

with little besides human good-will? He is not a 
gentleman in spite of inherited gestures and grimaces 
and, what is more, there is no alchemy by which 
he can be made into a gentleman. And the woman 
who "carried us all in her heart," making rough 
ways smooth, neither is she quite a lady. But she 
has this greatly in her favor, that the most indis- 
pensable of all gifts was hers for the making of 
the lady. It is here that Harriet Martineau comes 
to our aid. She has heard of our imperfect ways 
and her decision is this, that as far as extreme 
good-will, consideration, and intelligence to help 
others are concerned, "they have the best manners 
I have ever seen." This at least is better than the 
most varnished shell. 

Where the outer and inner perfection are united, 
we have the Paragon, but Emerson says this rare 
flower is seen "but once or twice in a Hfetime." 
If an entire people is considered, this combination 
of outer and inner graces is extremely rare in all 
Western nations. Latin peoples censure the man- 
ners of all Northern races; but Eastern folk, India, 
China, Japan, are as critical of the brusque and 
discourteous ways of France. It is all so relative 
as to save something of our pride. 

So far as improvement and right direction are con- 
cerned, the later critics give us gracious encourage- 
ment. It comes not alone from the new English 
ambassador. The historian Freeman, though he 
says, " No one teaches you your place so well as the 



212 AS OTHERS SEE US 

American hotel clerk," says of our outer life, "I 
have never, on land at least, fallen in with the 
pushing, questioning fellow-traveller, a dim tradi- 
tion of whom we are likely to take out with us. As 
for the American hotel, it is not an inn, but an 
institution." And of our home manners, "In pri- 
vate life, the American strikes me as, on the whole, 
more ceremonious than the Englishman on this 
side of the ocean. I do not profess to know how 
far this may be owing to the absence of acknowl- 
edged artificial distinctions, but it seems not unlikely 
that the two things may have something to do with 
one another. It certainly did strike me on the whole 
that, among those with whom I had to do in America, 
there was not less, but more attention paid to minute 
observances than there is in England." * 

* "Impressions of the United States," 1883, pp. 235 and 203. 

That other English historian, J. Anthony Froude, also wrote 
these words, "Nowhere in America have I met with vulgarity in 
its proper sense." 



CHAPTER XII 

OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 

One of our English visitors, after travelling sev- 
eral months in the United States, showed concern be- 
cause of our lack of humor. When he reached the 
Mississippi, he expressed his delight because he met 
a new kind of American who ^''sometimes understood 
a joke." 

"In general, I thought they had less of the frigid, uninvit- 
ing formality which characterizes the Americans further to 
the eastward. They were somewhat gruff, indeed, at times; 
but they seemed to trust themselves and us with more readi- 
ness, and sometimes understood a joke, which I hardly ever saw 
exemplified on this side of the Mississippi." ' 

I still recall the mental agitation roused by those 
four words, "sometimes understood a joke." That 
they fitly applied to other nations was something 
I had long taken for granted, but here they were 
fixed upon the funniest people in the world — the 
Americans. It proved very amusing to put this pas- 
sage before friends whose patriotic pieties had never 
been disturbed. I had lived half a life without 
once asking why the Americans should have en- 
grossed a possession so precious as the world's wit 

* "Travels in North America," Vol. Ill, p. 355. 
213 



214 AS OTHERS SEE US 

and humor. Had it come to this, that, of all the 
world, an English tourist was to lay rough hands on 
a belief so sanctified ? I read the passage to one of 
the most amusing of our countrymen. He listened 
to it as if dazed. When it was repeated to him, he 
said, "Is that his way of being funny?" When 
it was shown that Captain Hall was not trifling, the 
American replied, "Well, what would you expect 
of an Englishman?" This is the American attitude. 
By some alchemy, nature has endowed us with 
capacities for humor that makes us lonely among 
the nations. We have all been brought up on 
sallies against the English for the leisurely way in 
which they respond to Yankee wit. Few of us have 
not heard at least a thousand of those merry tales 
to illustrate the sluggish ways of the British in 
"seeing" our jokes. It is, therefore, with unusual 
emotion that we read of Hall's discovery, — an 
American who "sometimes understood a joke." 

A German meant to compliment us when he wrote 
that he noticed an improvement in the appreciation 
of humor in the United States, as if there were, after 
all, hope for us in this respect. Edmond de Nevers 
is struck by "the absence of the sense of the ridicu- 
lous." He thinks we owe such prestige as we have 
to the Irish. Even our pleasantries against the 
Paddy "are mostly by the descendants of the 
Irish," though he makes no reference to Mr. Dooley. 
Dickens wrote of us, "They certainly are not a 
humorous people," though he admitted that we had 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 215 

"a certain cast-iron quaintness" in which the New 
England Yankee "takes the lead." ^ 

An American much in Oxford confesses to have 
told one of his most irresistible stories at a college 
dinner given by one of the Dons. "When I fin- 
ished," he said, "there wasn't a laugh around the 
table. I attributed it to the habitual stolidity of 
the English in the presence of a good joke. I 
hinted as much to the man next me, who said, ' Oh, 
but we have been telling that ever since the Master 
of Trinity got it off.'" The American added, "That 
was my first shock. I honestly thought we had a 
monopoly of humor that nobody even questioned." 
That is probably still the opinion of most good 
Americans.^ 

Even if true, it is stiffly gainsaid by many of these 
foreign critics. One of the French writers makes a 
special study of our funny papers. After spending 
a good deal of time on the files of Puck and Judge, 
he says, "If these are supposed by their readers to 
be examples of humor, those who read them have 
that sense only in its most elemental stage of develop- 

^ "American Notes," p. 206. 

' This is like the angered surprise of an Englishman as he 
read the advice in an American paper, that a party just o£f for 
England should keep with their own countrymen and "so avoid 
the horrid English intonation." To suggest that the English peo- 
ple had either accent or intonation seemed to him an indignity. 

An American in Austria has a kindred emotion in reading in 
a restaurant a placard on which was written, " EngUsh spoken and 
American understood." 



2l6 AS OTHERS SEE US 

ment. How can a really intelligent people think 
such horseplay — des grosses plaisanteries — witty?" 
Harriet Martineau says we have a kind of drollery 
that is neither English humor nor French wit, and 
Captain Marryat, who certainly did not lack humor, 
says, "There is no country, perhaps, in which the 
habit of deceiving for amusement, or what is termed 
hoaxing, is so common. Indeed, this and the hyper- 
bole constitute the major part of the American 
humor." * 

When Miss Martineau speaks of a kind of jesting 
"in conformity with our institutions," she throws 
light on this whole dark problem. I once heard a 
Greek scholar read from a collection of Greek jokes. 
To the hearers, nine out of ten of these ancient 
humors were of such exceeding solemnity that all 
were puzzled to know why they should be classed 
among things called funny. But in the audience 
not six of us knew enough of Greek institutions and 
life to get the local color and contrasts that created 
the humorous element. An American, caring enough 
for the English Punch to subscribe for it, told me, 
"We have no wittier sheet, but the regular succession 
of horse and racing jokes bores me." He added, 
"I neither know anything nor care anything about 
horses," which gives us all the explanation we need. 
This is offset by a German who thought our Life 
the very limit of dulness, until he had lived a year 
in this country: "When I understood something of 

^ "A Diary in America," Vol. I, p. 8. 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 21 7 

the inner life of the nation, its politics, industry, and 
leading social events, I discovered why I could not 
at first appreciate the wit." 

That hurrying travellers in foreign countries should 
not keep in mind a fact so elementary as this, has a 
grim humor of its own. A college instructor in the 
East, returning from his first summer tour on the 
continent, gravely said that among other impressions 
he was struck by the absence of humor abroad. 
This penetrating voyager had a slight OllendorflF 
capacity to make sentences in two or three languages. 
With the subtle and pliant idiom of these tongues, 
he had not even a nodding acquaintance. Of the 
current political and social happenings among these 
peoples, he also knew little. Yet it was his apparent 
expectation to be admitted forthwith among those 
intimacies of light and shade in national experience, 
that alone can give the key to wit and humor. 
The "Souvenirs a la Main" in the Paris Figaro 
are not explosively entertaining to one who knows 
nothing of what happens from day to day in the 
French metropolis. 

An American who had lived so far into the Pari- 
sian life as to catch the zest of French wit, sub- 
scribed, when he returned home, for the Figaro. 
. . . Within a few weeks the sheet had lost all 
interest for him so far as the witticisms were con- 
cerned. To read them in his New England home 
was to lose the whole atmosphere from which they 
took their flavor. 



2l8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

We need not, therefore, be utterly cast down by 
the chilUng tone of these foreigners about our own 
Umitations. They do embarrass us about one proud 
and confident claim, namely, that we possess in 
some supreme and exclusive degree the gift of being 
funny. That we have varieties of wit and humor 
peculiar to our traditions, is very generally ad- 
mitted. Here, for example, is an attempt at a 
definition of English as against Yankee humor : — 

"And we must avow that in our opinion the Yankee humor 
has not the ruddy health, the abounding animal spirits, the 
glow and glory of healthful and hearty life of our greatest 
English. As the Yankee has a leaner look, a thinner humanity, 
than the typical Englishman who gives such a fleshy and burly 
embodiment to his love of beef and beer, so the humor is less 
plump and rubicund. It does not revel in the same richness 
nor enjoy its wealth in the same happy unconscious way, nor 
attain to the like fulness and play of power. We cannot 
imagine Yankee humor, with its dry drollery, its shrewd 
keeking, shut-eyed way of looking at things, ever embodying 
such a mountain of mirth as we have in Falstaff." 

A visitor professes to have cut the next example 
from an Ohio paper. He says our bragging habits 
have produced a humor of "rare and special flavor." 
He assumes that the writer is making merry at the 
expense of some boasting rival editor : — 

Z^" "This is a glorious country ! It has longer rivers and more 
' of them, and they are muddier and deeper, and run faster and 
rise higher, and make more noise, and fall lower, and do more 
damage than anybody else's rivers. It has more lakes, and 
they are bigger and deeper, and clearer and wetter than those 
of any other country. Our rail-cars are bigger, and run faster, 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 219 

and pitch off the track oftener, and kill more people than all 
other rail-cars in this and every other country. Our steam- 
boats carry bigger loads, are longer and broader, burst their 
boilers oftener, and send up their passengers higher, and the 
captains swear harder than steamboat captains in any other 
country. Our men are bigger and longer and thicker; can 
fight harder and faster, drink more mean whiskey, chew more 
bad tobacco, and spit more, and spit further than in any other 
country. Our ladies are richer, prettier, dress finer, spend 
more money, break more hearts, wear bigger hoops, shorter 
dresses, and kick up the devil generally to a greater extent 
than all other ladies in all other countries. Our children 
squall louder, grow faster, get too expansive for their panta- 
loons, and become twenty years old sooner by some months 
than any other children of any other country on the earth." 

Earlier in the century the Yankee trader is thought 
to have developed a form of humor of which this is 
given as an example : — 

"Reckon I couldn't drive a trade with you to-day, Square," 
said a genuine specimen of the Yankee pedler as he stood at 
the door of a merchant in St. Louis. 

"I reckon you calculate about right, for you can't noways." 

"Wall, guess you needn't git huffy, 'beout it. Now, here's 
a dozen ginooine razor-strops — wuth two dollars and a half 
■ — you may hev 'em for two dollars." 

"I tell }'ou I don't want any of your traps, so you may as 
well be going along." 

"Wall, now, look here. Square. I'll bet you five dollars 
that if you make me an offer for them 'ere strops, we'll have a 
trade yet." 

"Done," said the merchant, and he staked the money. 
"Now," says he chaffingly, "I'll give you sixpence for the 
strops." 

"They're your'n !" said the Yankee, as he quietly pocketed 



220 AS OTHERS SEE US 

the stakes! "but," continued he, after a Httle reflection, and 
with a burst of frankness, "I calculate a joke's a joke; and 
if you don't want them strops, I'll trade back." The merchant 
looked brighter. "You're not so bad a chap after all," said 
he. "Here are your strops — give me the money." "There 
it is," said the Yankee, as he took the strops and handed back 
the sixpence. "A trade is a trade, and a bet a bet. Next 
time you trade with that 'ere sixpence, don't you buy razor- 
strops." 

It is, however, often granted that this endowment 
is more widely diffused among our people than 
in England. Further than this, most of the critics 
do not go. That we have any monopoly of what is 
essential to the soul of wit and humor is rather 
cavalierly denied. An American essayist, the charm 
and delicacy of whose humor has such growing 
recognition, has recently returned from six months 
in England, where he was in much popular demand 
as a lecturer.^ He tells me that the response of an 
English audience to humor seems to him on the whole 
quicker than that of an American audience. This is 
probably also a tribute to the quality of the lecturer's 
humor. 

Our prolific pleasantries to prove the poverty of 
the English capacity to "catch on" are really very 
amazing. Not to mention Shakespeare and the 
wits of his age, what is to be said of Sydney Smith, 
Charles Lamb, Jerrold, Monckton Milnes, Thack- 
eray, Dickens, Tom Taylor, and many others? 

* Dr. Samuel M. Crothers, author of "The Gentle Reader," 
"The Pardoner's Wallet." etc. 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 221 

We have not alone to think of these individuals, but 
to think also that England furnished the audience 
to appreciate them, which is even more to the pur- 
pose. Let the American set down his most patriotic 
list and balance them against the English wits. Can 
we outmatch Sydney Smith, Charles Lamb, or 
Dickens by any three of our most glittering names? 
Any summing up of the subtleties of French wit 
would embarrass us at least as much. I select 
England especially, because it has long amused us 
to banter her for her general density in these matters. 

There is much agreement among our critics that 
the quality of American humor suffers chiefly from 
exaggeration; that the elements of contrast and 
surprise are put to great strain ; that too little appeal 
is made to the imagination. William Archer gives 
us an illustration : A Chicago man travelling in 
Louisiana wrote to his sweetheart : " Dear Mamie, — 
I have shot an alligator. When I have shot another, 
I will send you a pair of slippers." ^ 

Again. A tired traveller arrives at a country hotel 
and calls for a bootjack to remove his boots. The 
proprietor noticing the size of his guest's feet says, 
"You come by the Croyden road, didn't ye?" 
"Yes." "Wall, you noticed that one road forked 
off toward Westbridge. I'm tellin' you this, be- 
cause no bootjack made by the hand of man will 
git them boots off. You've got to go back to the 
fork in them roads." 

^ "America To-day," p. 99. 



222 AS OTHERS SEE US 

The French find most fault with this extrava- 
gance, especially as seen upon the stage. If they 
find it on the ranch or in a Western paper, the 
setting appears to them perfect. One boasts that 
he has discovered the essence of American fun in 
this exaggeration coupled with our inveterate good 
nature. "They show a droll solicitude not to injure 
any one's feelings, even though he be an arrant 
scamp." This Frenchman, staying in a small 
California hotel, is tricked out of a sum of money by 
a sharper who lived on friendly terms with everybody 
in the town. The victim rushes to the landlord. 
"But this fellow is what you call a crook. Is it 
not so? Is he not a thief, a thief?" The landlord, 
quite undisturbed, replies, "Wall, that's a purty 
strong word you're usin'. I shouldn't like to call 
him a thief, though after I shake hands with him, 
I do generally count my fingers." ^ 

Another variation attributed to us is a tendency to 
make one's self out very vicious in order to heighten 

^ This guest reports an instance in still milder form. "But 
did you ever see a stingier old skinflint ?" To which is replied, "I 
don't know's he's stingy exactly, but he does keep his benevolent 
impulses pretty well under control." 

A very recent traveller, whose chief interest was the study of 
Christian Science, hears of some one who has abandoned his con- 
nection with this faith. The investigator eagerly seeks to know 
the reasons for the man's apostasy. "But why," he asks, "having 
enjoyed such an experience, did you give up?" "Well, to tell you 
the truth," was the reply, "I just got tired out being so d — d happy 
all the time." This was at once classed as American humor, and 
would be very pointless in any community which knew nothing of 
what is at least popularly attributed to this faith. 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 223 

the effect. A newly arrived English prelate, with 
much clerical excess in his appearance, boards a 
trolley car in New York. He is on the alert for 
information. Seeing what he supposes to be a 
vigorous working-class specimen, he sits down by 
him with the question, "I hear you have been having 
very interesting political events here in New York 
during the last week or two." The gentleman 
from the Bowery turned to take a leisurely but rather 
consuming look at his questioner, "I don't know," 
was the answer, "I've been drunk the last fortnight," 
and the conversation closed. 

Another variety is left without definition, but this 
French inquisitor thinks, I know not why, that it 
could have happened nowhere out of America. A 
Western paper notices the death of "our old friend 
and neighbor Lyman Rogers." Sympathy is ex- 
pressed for the bereaved wife, followed by a tribute 
to the dead, and closing with the words, "He has 
gone to a better home." Whereupon the newly 
made widow brings instant action for libel against 
the editor. 

One reviewer writes that the most peculiar form of 
American humor is the "high falutin." The follow- 
ing, which he thinks is by Webster, "is the best of its 
kind": — 

" Men of Rochester, I am glad to see you ; and I am glad to 
see your noble city. Gentlemen, I saw your falls, which I am 
told are one hundred and fifty feet high. This is a very inter- 
esting fact. Gentlemen, Rome had her Caesar, her Scipio, 



224 AS OTHERS SEE US 

her Brutus, but Rome in her proudest days had never a water- 
fall a hundred and fifty feet high! Gentlemen, Greece had 
her Pericles, her Demosthenes, and her Socrates, but Greece 
in her palmiest days never had a waterfall a hundred and 
r^\ fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on. No people ever 

c^ lost their liberties who had a waterfall one hundred and fifty 

feet high!" 

From frontier life an Englishman quotes this as 
"impossible in any other country." An elderly 
lady from the East, with a passion for botanical 
studies, goes into the cowboy's country, builds a 
small house, and begins her work of collecting speci- 
mens. Absorbed one day at her work far out on the 
prairie, she sees a cowboy riding toward her as for 
life. When within call, he cries out, "Your house 
is on fire!" What the botanic lady expected in 
way of news is unreported, but she said to the 
cowboy, " Oh, is that all?" Whereupon the amazed 
ranchman exclaimed, "Well, God bless my soul, 
Madam, that's all I think of at the present moment, 
but I'll look round the country and see if I can find 
something to interest you," and rides away. 

Another visitor is told by a Southern teacher, the 
late Dr. Mclver, that our travelling salesmen — 
drummers — are the reservoirs of what is most 
peculiar in American wit. Dr. Mclver added that 
the drummers, immediately after the Civil War, 
were the first real peacemakers. They went in 
large numbers through the Southland seeking trade. 
There was the never failing resource of a batch of 
good stories. "During these first bitter years," 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 225 

said the Doctor, " when the clergy, editors, and poH- 
ticians were fighting each other across the hne, the 
drummer was the real brother and neighbor, and it 
convinces me that the Good Samaritan was himself 
a drummer. You remember that the church folk 
came upon the poor fellow and the first said, 'This 
is too bad, but I have an appointment in Jericho, 
so I will ask some one from the Christian Association 
to look out for him.' The next man — probably a 
deacon — has to meet his wife in Jericho at five 
o'clock, and thinks he will telephone to the Associated 
Charities to take up the case. Finally comes the 
drummer, who is touched by compassion. He takes 
the poor fellow in hand, according to scripture. 
The internal evidence that he was a drummer is 
complete. He knew where the best hotel was; he 
was coming that way again, and he had liquor by 
him." 

From the press an Englishman cuts out the two 
following as "very characteristic": "Wanted, a 
servant girl that isn't above living on an equality 
with the family." Seeing a large number of hacks 
in a funeral, the traveller asks a man on the street, 
if some important citizen has died. "No, not very; 
and you know, Stranger, you can't always tell just 
what estimate the Almighty puts on a departed soul, 
by the number of hacks." 

Another selects as "peculiarly American" the 
following from Josh Billings : — 

"The mule is half horse and half jackass, and then comes 
Q 



226 AS OTHERS SEE US 

to a full stop, Nature discovering her mistake. The only way 
to keep a mule in a pasture is to turn it into a meadow adjoin- 
ing, and let it jump out. They are like some men, very cor- 
rupt at heart. I've known them to be good mules for six 
months, just to get a good chance to kick somebody." 

"Some people are fond of bragging about their ancestors, 
and their great descent, when in fact their great descent is just 
what is the matter with them." 

"God save the fools, and don't let them run out! for if it 
wasn't for them, wise men couldn't get a living." 

"It is true that wealth won't make a man virtuous, but I 
notice there ain't anybody who wants to be poor just for the 
purpose of being good." 

It is drolleries like these that attract attention, 
especially from the English. A Frenchman con- 
fesses that he "spent days trying, v^ithout success, 
to see why Mr. Dooley should be given such high 
rank." All readers of "Tartarin" know that Al- 
phonse Daudet did not lack humor, yet he is said 
to have done his best to laugh over the pages of 
Mark Twain, but always in vain. 

One critic cuts from a Pittsburg paper an account 
of a suicide who left ample justification for taking his 
life in the following culmination of misfortunes : — 

"I married a widow who had a grown-up daughter. My 
father visited our house very often, fell in love with my step- 
daughter and married her. So my father became my son-in- 
law, and my step-daughter my mother, because she was my 
father's wife. Some time afterwards my wife had a son — 
he was my father's brother-in-law and my uncle, for he was 
the brother of my step-mother. My father's wife, i.e. my 
step-daughter, had also a son ; he was, of course, my brother, 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 227 

and in the meantime my grandchild, for he was the son of my 
daughter. My wife was my grandmother, because she was 
my mother's mother. I was my wife's husband and grand- 
child at the same time. And as the husband of a person's 
grandmother is his grandfather, I was my own grandfather." 

If there are shades of difference in American 
humor, Miss Martineau's suggestion is right, that 
the differences are largely traceable to whatever is 
peculiar in our institutions and national experience. 
This is the commonplace with which we began, but 
which very few travellers among foreign peoples 
appear to realize in their attempts to standardize 
wit.^ . I have heard several Americans, still cutting 
their teeth upon the language, insist that the German 
funny paper, Fliegende Blaeiter, was very heavy and 
not in the least to be compared with some humorous 
American sheet. But how could a callow provin- 
cialism like this justify itself? If there is anywhere 
in the world a detached and cosmopolitan genius 
competent to act as umpire, it is conceivable that 
he would declare Life funnier than Fliegende Blaetter 
or vice versa — but it is not conceivable that out- 
siders, such as these American students still were, 
should have any opinion of the slightest value on that 
subject. To know whether the German sheet is 

^ I have heard very sniffy comments by an outsider on the 
merry works of Wilhelm Busch, author of Max and Moritz, etc. 
It could not be compared to the "high quality" of the Frenchman 
Caran d'Ache, for example. But to "democratize laughter," to 
add to the jollity of an entire nation decade after decade is a fact 
behind which we cannot go. 



228 AS OTHERS SEE US 

witty or otherwise requires an intimacy of touch with 
delicate phases of life and thought that only years 
can give. I listened to a play in Paris, which at 
two points brought out from the audience a tumult 
of merriment. I had carefully read the play and 
perfectly understood the laughter-provoking sen- 
tences, but it was several days before I could fall in 
with the gaiety. I found the explanation at last 
in the grotesque awkwardness in which a pompous 
local mayor had entangled himself. I stood quite 
as much in need of a surgical operation to admit the 
joke as Sydney Smith's Scotchman. But that need 
is common to all the world until it is admitted into 
this inner and familiar life of a people. Not only 
have the general currents of national experience 
to be known, but also the more hidden currents of 
tradition, custom, and prejudice as these express 
themselves in the emotions of the hour. It was only 
after several years of continuous life in France that 
Hamerton could get the full humor of a provincial 
theatre. 

If we are content with modest tributes, they do not 
fail. I asked an English author of one of the really 
good books upon the United States ^ how he would 
state the difference between the English and Ameri- 
can appreciation of humor. This gentleman has 
lived long in this country and his book shows an 
admirable competence to judge. He said, "I think 
the difference is a real one, that the people of this 

' "The Land of Contrasts." 



OUR MONOPOLY OF WIT 229 

country have a more generally diffused sense of 
humor than in England." Professor Miinsterberg 
gives his judgment as follows. He has also been 
here long enough to give weight to his words. He 
characterizes the quality as "whimsical," but adds 
that it is a great social equalizer. 

"There is only one more sovereign power than the spirit 
of sport in breaking down all social distinctions ; it is American 
humor. We could not speak of political or intellectual life 
without emphasizing this irrepressible humor; but we must 
not forget it for a moment in speaking of social life, for its 
influence pervades every social situation. The only ques- 
tion is whether it is the humor which overcomes every dis- 
turbance of social equilibrium and so restores the conscious- 
ness of free and equal self-assertion, or whether it is this 
consciousness which fosters humor and seeks expression in a 
good-natured lack of respect. No immoderation, no improper 
presumption, and no pomposity can survive the first humorous 
comment, and the American does not wait long for this. The 
soap-bubble is pricked amid genial laughter, and equality is 
restored. Whether it is in a small matter or whether in a 
question of national importance, a latent humor pervades all 
social life. 

"A happy humorous turn will remind them all that they are 
equal fellow-citizens, and that they are not to take their differ- 
ent functions in Hfe too solemnly, nor to suppose that their 
varied outward circumstances introduce any real inequality. 
As soon as Americans hear a good story, they come at once to 
an understanding, and it is well known that many political 
personalities have succeeded because of their wit, even if its 
quantity was more than its quality." ^ 

Mr. Bryce's experience has so much in common 

' "The Americans," pp. 543-544- 



230 AS OTHERS SEE US 

with our own, that we listen to him on this delicate 
point without pique. 

"There is a difference, slight yet perceptible, in the part 
which both sentiment and humor play in American books, 
when we compare them with English books of equivalent 
strength. The humor has a vein of oddity, and the contrast 
between the soft copiousness of the sentiment and the rigid 
lines of lingering Puritanism which it suffuses, is rarely met 
with in England. Perhaps there is less repose in the American 
style; there is certainly a curious unrestfulness in the effort, 
less common in English writers, to bend metaphors to un- 
wonted uses." * 

"Humor is a sweetener of temper, a copious spring of 
charity, for it makes the good side of bad things even more 
visible than the weak side of good things ; but humor in Ameri- 
cans may be as much a result of an easy and kindly turn as 
their kindliness is of their humor." ^ 

This partial analysis which our critics help us to 
make does not deprive us of a single jocose talent. 
It is not that we are lacking, but rather that others 
are more richly endowed than we were aware. It 
looks as if we had preened ourselves upon a far too 
exclusive possession of the "rare sweetener of life's 
severities." To know that our foreign neighbors 
have this solace, even as we have it, ought to be good 
news to us. To be cocksure that we are the funniest 
among nations would too surely bring upon us from 
impartial outsiders that most damning criticism, 
"lack of humor" on our own part. 

* "The American Commonwealth," Vol. II, p. 618. 
2 Ibid., p. 666. 



CHAPTER XIII 

OUR GREATEST CRITIC 

In the Introduction to "The American Common- 
weaUh" Mr. Bryce says, "When I first visited 
America eighteen years ago, I brought home a 
swarm of bold generahzations. Half of them were 
thrown overboard after a second visit in 1881. Of 
the half that remained, some were dropped into the 
Atlantic when I returned across it after a third visit 
in 1883-1884; and although the two later journeys 
gave birth to some new views, these views are fewer 
and more discreetly cautious than their departed 
sisters of 1870."^ 

If this openness and flexibility of mind are in- 
dispensable to the critic's judgment, another quali- 
fication already noted is not less so. It is an 
unforced human sympathy with one's fellowmen. 
I heard a snobbish American ask Phillips Brooks in 
Europe how he managed to avoid the crowd of his 
fellow-countrymen. The great preacher's answer 
had in it an edge of rebuke and severity which the 
printed reply does not convey, "I do not try to 
avoid them, because I like them." "Because I 
like them!" There are not many critics who can 

1 Vol. I, p. 4. 
231 



232 AS OTHERS SEE US 

say that without telhng hes. Some subtle and clever 
books in my list are rich in entertainment, but 
one closes them with the feeling that the writers do 
not like their kind ; that they rather fear and dislike 
too close contact with them. 

This feeling of good-will toward one's kind may 
be instantly detected in every first-rate foreign ob- 
server. It is in Sir Charles Lyell, it is in Chevalier, 
it is in de Tocqueville, it is in James Bryce. There 
is a largeness about these men which enables them 
to deal w^ith human nature in another country, at 
least as generously as they would deal with it in 
their own. If they note differences in habits, cus- 
toms, and behavior, they are not merely pestered 
by them, but rather interested to account for and 
explain them. Lyell finds himself in a small town 
of the Middle West at a time when it was literally 
frontier. He is annoyed by curious and persistent 
questions, — but he does not pillory the whole town, 
like Mrs. Trollope, as intolerable nuisances. He 
does not, like the author of "Cyril Thornton," 
look upon the annoyance merely as impertinence. 
As a man of science, even a prying inquisitiveness 
interests him. It is a pity that its exercise must be 
quite so personally directed to his clothes and glass, 
but the narrowness and monotony of their lives ex- 
plain this. Curiosity is excellent intellectual ma- 
terial. When the community has more varied 
interests, this eagerness to know things will have its 
higher and more impersonal expression. To philoso- 




Author of " The American Commonwealth 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 233 

phize about one's kind in so kindly a temper as this, 
in the very midst of discomforts and awkward intru- 
sions, is given to no man who does not Hke his fellows. 
One could quote many passages from "The Ameri- 
can Commonwealth" to show this spirit of cosmo- 
politan good-fellowship with which the author enters 
into broad human relations with Americans. In his 
chapter on "The Pleasantness of American Life," 
he says : — 

"This naturalness of intercourse is a distinct addition to the 
pleasure of social Hfe. It enlarges the circle of possible friend- 
ship by removing the gene which in most parts of Europe per- 
sons of different ranks feel in exchanging their thoughts on 
any matters save those of business. It raises the humbler 
classes without lowering the upper; indeed, it improves the 
upper no less than the lower by expunging that latent insolence 
which deforms the manners of so many of the European rich 
or great. It relieves women in particular, who in Europe are 
especially apt to think of class distinctions, from that sense of 
constraint and uneasiness which is produced by the knowledge 
that other women with whom they come in contact are either 
looking down on them, or at any rate trying to gauge and 
determine their social position. It expands the range of a 
man's sympathies, and makes it easier for him to enter into 
the sentiments of other classes than his own." ^ 

Here is none of the arch snobbery that prides 
itself on the exclusiveness of one's friendships. 
That is good which enlarges the circle. "Equality 
improves manners, for it strengthens the basis of all 
good manners, respect for other men and women 
simply as men and women irrespective of their station 

1 Vol. II, p. 663. 



234 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in life." This is the inclusive Idndhness which 
makes democracy possible. There is neither vapor- 
ing nor cant when he approves the social condition 
in which the shoemaker and the factory hand 
address you as an equal. 

In the first few days Mr. Bryce confesses to the 
unpleasantness he felt at the brusque and careless 
disregard with which some officials treated his 
inquiries. He soon saw that this was without in- 
tended offence and it ceased to vex or even disquiet 
him. 

The smaller critic does not forgive a wounded 
personal vanity. The defence of his own little 
dignity becomes at once his main concern. One of 
these in a western town asks a man, "who looked 
as if he needed a shilling," to take his valise to the 
hotel. The needy individual turned upon him with 
the question, "Stranger, does that pack require 
two folks to carry it?" "No, one person can carry 
it." "Well, then, I guess you'll take it yourself; 
you are as big as I be and look as if you'd been 
livin' at a better boardin'-house than mine." 
The victim of this retort was incensed beyond meas- 
ure. "I even put myself out a little," he says, "to 
do him a good turn, only to meet this brutal rebuff." 
Mr. Bryce would have paid money to get such a 
reply. He would even have stayed over a train to 
make the man's acquaintance. It is, however, 
certain that Mr. Bryce's tone and manner would 
never have called forth the rebuff. 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 235 

I have known an American scholar to travel some 
weeks in Germany in a chronic state of disgust at 
the brusqueness of the lesser German officials. He 
returned for a longer stay in that country to learn, 
in his own words, that "I had lost half the pleasure 
of that first trip by being a plain — fool. I finally 
learned why those officials take themselves and their 
work a good deal more seriously than we do in our 
country, and I also learned that behind the manner, 
there is an admirable conscientiousness and will- 
ingness to take great trouble to help you out of 
difficulties." 

It is the distinction of the first-rate critic to 
assume this good-will at the start. He assumes it 
and acts upon it without waiting for the proofs. 

In the middle of the last century a German by the 
name of Platenius thus comments on the American 
habit of sitting with the feet elevated on railings and 
tables. "I have not yet found the cause of this very 
common practice, but I am confident it is explained 
and justified by some physiological reason like that 
of imperfect digestion or circulation." This diag- 
nosis may be at fault, but the temper is that of the 
perfect traveller. Mr. Bryce has this temper; he 
has the human good-will; he has done his work of 
investigation with unmatched thoroughness. From 
lifelong study and travel his grasp of "world politics" 
long since put him easily in the first rank of publicists. 
He has travelled widely enough and intelligently 
enough to apply the comparative method in making 



236 AS OTHERS SEE US 

up a human document. If he is discussing American 
manners or morals, his judgment means something 
because he has watched manners and morals in 
many countries. If he deals with our asserted pas- 
sion for dollars, he has had experience enough 
among many people to apply some intelligent test 
to the criticism. It is this large mastery of con- 
temporary political and social experience which 
makes Mr. Bryce, not only superior to de Tocque- 
ville, but clearly our greatest critic. 

It is not only that the author of "The American 
Commonwealth" paid many visits to this country, 
it is also because here and in England he kept in the 
closest intellectual touch with those Americans who 
were competent and glad to assist him. His in- 
quiries were so definite and so penetrating; they so 
touched the "live-wire" issues of the time, that it 
was an honor and intellectual pleasure to get in- 
formation for him. One of his American friends 
and helpers said, "We never get such good talk 
about our own home problems as when Mr. Bryce 
is present to ask questions." This gentlemanly 
temper, this sympathy and searching observation, 
are not absent in a single critic who ranks with 
Lyell, de Tocqueville, Chevalier, and Bryce. 

This is not a ranking of critics according to their 
good opinion of this country. The weakest and 
untruest things about us are often the hasty and in- 
discriminate praises. Lyell, Chevalier, de Tocque- 
ville, have admonitions enough, but they so stand out 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 237 

on a background of proper information and human 
good-will that only the pettiest provincialism will 
take offence. No man has given more final tests of 
sincerity in his democratic sympathies than Mr, 
Bryce, His attitude toward Irish Home Rule and 
even more the moral bravery he showed during the 
Boer War (whatever the merits of that struggle 
may have been) are even better proofs than passages 
like this: "When the humbler classes have differed 
in opinion from the higher, they have often proved 
by the event to have been right and their so-called 
betters wrong." But to this inborn spirit of demo- 
cratic good-fellowship and breeding, must be added 
a training for his task that few men living or dead 
have received. We have to think of "The American 
Commonwealth" not as a study finished in 1887, 
but, through its revisions and later letters, as the 
sustained and coherent judgment of more than thirty 
years. He is not in the least a mere bookworm. 
His academic distinction was eminent, but as a globe 
trotter he was as intelligently the student as in writing 
the Holy Roman Empire. It was these large studies, 
together with his knowledge of comparative politics 
and his arduous labor as a practical politician, that 
have given him a supreme fitness to report upon the 
political structure and social spirit of this country. 
Not the least among the services of this monu- 
mental work is, that hundreds of Europeans read it 
as a preparation for their coming to this country. 
I once heard from a foreicrn scholar this admirable 



238 AS OTHERS SEE US 

word: "To read Bryce before you leave home, and 
then, with your own notes and memories, to read it 
again when you return, is the surest way to know 
America and to know it at its best." I have also 
heard one of our own scholars say that "he knew no 
single study that so effectively helped an American 
to know his own country as he ought to know it, as 
'The American Commonwealth.'" ^ 

As one looks back upon the universal touchiness 
under foreign comment, it is the more surprising 
that scarcely a protest has been raised against Bryce's 
strictures. In spite of the uniform cordiality and 
appreciation, there is a good deal of plain spealdng 
that would have aroused resentment even a genera- 
tion before the work appeared. One angry verbal 
protest I do remember: that "Bryce must have been 
blind in at least one eye to say that 'neither the 
Rocky Mountains, with their dependent ranges, nor 
the Sierra Nevada, can be compared for variety of 
grandeur and beauty with the Alps.'" Gold win 
Smith says this more strongly still and it is probably 
true. But Bryce refers also to our cities: "Their 
monotony haunts one Uke a nightmare." He makes 
a few exceptions, but says : ^ — 

"In all, the same shops, arranged on the same plan, the 
same Chinese laundries, with Li Kow visible through the win- 
dow, the same ice-cream stores, the same large hotels with seedy 

^ It is perhaps a trivial warning, but I have found that the 
average person is more likely to read both volumes if he begins 
with Part IV of the second volume. 

* "The American Commonwealth," Vol. II, p. 670. 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 239 

men hovering about in the dreary entrance-hall, the same 
street-cars passing to and fro, with passengers clinging to the 
door-step." 

"Travel where you will, you feel that what you have found 
in one place, that you will find in another. The thing which 
hath been, will be : you can no more escape from it than you 
can quit the land to hve in the sea." ' 

Nor is this "monotony" an affair alone of ex- 
ternals. It appears in our mental habits, where it 
may be merely tiresome, or dangerous if it express 
itself in our political thinking. Like de Tocqueville, 
Bryce fears our lack of independence in politics; 
that there are "so few independent schools of 
opinion." "The structure of the party discipline 
leaves little freedom of individual thought or action 
to the member of the legislature." It is our "weak 
point" that free and unbiassed political opinion finds 
such difficulty in "bringing itself to bear upon those 
who govern either as legislators or executive officers."^ 
Outside the line of party interests, there may be the 
bravest shoutings and display of intellectual courage, 
as if to call off the attention from vital issues. So 
vigorous a party Republican as Congressman Little- 
field is reported recently as saying, "If there is 
anything more cowardly than one Congressman, it 
is two Congressmen:" — 

" It is a humiliating fact that the House of Representatives 
is the most cowardly political body in the United States. It is 
not even equal to the ordinary State Legislature. The ordi- 

' "The American Commonwealth," Vol. II, p. 674. 
2 Ibid., p. 288. 



240 AS OTHERS SEE US 

nary congressman, when he is elected, gets the notion that there 
is a career before him. It is almost impossible to get any mem- 
ber of Congress to vote against any proposition that seems to 
imperil his chances of return." ^ 

This is what Mr. Bryce points out. We have seen 
the same criticism in de Tocqueville. We shall see 
it later in other form in Miinsterberg and more 
powerfully still in Ostrogorski. 

Mr. Bryce also speaks of the " commonness of mind 
and tone, a want of dignity and elevation in and 
about the conduct of public affairs, an insensibility 
to the nobler aspects and finer responsibilities of 
national life." This is also true; but that so great 
a multitude of American readers should accept these 
and other strictures while showering praises on the 
author's head, is a new and extremely hopeful 
fact. 

In the half century which separates de Tocqueville 
from Bryce, no one had attempted to cope with the 
whole theory and practice of our political life, as 
well as to enter minutely into questions of manners, 
habits, and ideas, Mr. Bryce does this in his first 
edition of 1888, more completely in the third edition 
and in the letters published in 1905, in which he 
reviews the changes observable in the United States 
between his first visit in 1870 and that of 1905.^ No 
one of our critics has given any such extensive and 

' Reported from address before the Providence, R.I., Com- 
mercial Club, April 23, 1907. 

^ Outlook, March and April, 1905. 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 241 

intensive study of political structure in this country. 
No one has entered more intimately into the whole 
spiritual life of the nation. That the net judgment 
of this profound study should be (I cannot help using 
the word) so doggedly hopeful; that it should be 
informed by a certain gaiety of good cheer and con- 
fidence that all is to turn out well with us in the 
United States, has of course much to do with the 
supreme rank accorded to Mr. Bryce's books. The 
serenity of the author's optimism falls in with that 
most persistent trait of the American character, 
hopefulness. Scarcely^a critic fails to note this 
insistent American characteristic. Mr. Bryce not 
only gives voice to this, but he adduces an ordered 
host of reasons which he believes justifies our op- 
timism. In the Introduction he writes of the doubt- 
ers who fail "to realize the existence in the American 
people of a reserve of force and patriotism more than 
sufficient to sweep away all the evils which are now 
tolerated, and to make the politics of the country 
worthy of its material grandeur and of the private 
virtues of its inhabitants. America excites an 
admiration which must be felt on the spot to be 
understood. The hopefulness of her people com- 
municates itself to one who moves among them, and 
makes him perceive that the graver faults of politics 
may be far less dangerous there than they would be 
in Europe. A hundred times in writing this book 
have I been disheartened by the facts I was stating ; 
a hundred times has the recollection of the abounding 



242 AS OTHERS SEE US 

strength and vitality of the nation chased away these 
tremors." ^ 

I was once asked by an Enghsh friend, much in this 
country, if there were any way in which this obstinate 
residuum of American optimism could be explained. 

"You have men who make a bluff at pessimism. They 
talk fiercely against all sorts of things in their own country, 
but they always surprise you finally by adding 'Still it's all 
coming out right in the end.' Nothing impresses me in the 
United States more than this characteristic. But I do not 
understand it, nor does Mr. Bryce satisfy me. If your politics 
are as bad as he implies and as most of you say they are ; if 
so much of your business is polluted, as your best witnesses 
insist, why does every discussion among you have the same 
refrain, 'Yes, it's bad, but it's sure to turn out all right in the 
end'?" 

This seems to me to touch the one critical weak- 
ness in Mr. Bryce's volumes. Again and again he 
brings the reader to a yawning gulf of perplexities. 
We are allowed to take one frightened glimpse 
into the depths, only to be hurried instantly back on 
to high safe ground. Nothing is more momentous 
in the national life than the character and influence 
of large cities. Yet our political method appears 
to have failed in managing these moulding centres 
in our common life. The main ground of Mr. 
Bryce's optimism about us is our inveterate, under- 
lying hopefulness. 

From a good many wise people, I have tried to get 

' "The American Commonwealth," Vol. I, p. lo. 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 243 

some answer to this question, Does the evidence in 
Mr. Bryce's books justify his optimism ? ^ 

One is quick to note that the answers take the 
form of rehgious faith rather than of a reasoned 
conviction that appeals to definite proofs. One of 
our first-rate scholars of American politics tells me, 
"It is very discouraging that Pennsylvania, after 
the moral rousing of last year, should apparently 
sink back helpless under the same contemptible 
party tyranny. But," he hastens to add, "I am 
sure it will all come out right." Yes, most of us 
believe that, but do the volumes of Mr. Bryce con- 
tain the evidences of these things not seen? 

Thirty-five years after his first coming, Mr. Bryce 
reviewed the most important changes observable 
in the United States since 1870. His summary is 
the more remarkable because he had seen much of 
the "Shame of Cities" as it had been reported by 
men like Lincoln Steffens. Most of this relentless 
inquisition into our political and business life was as 
truthfully as it was ably done. In spite of the direct 
personal character of the evidence, no important 
part of it has been in the least shaken by those under 
fire. Everywhere one heard angry and scornful 
denial in private. I heard a United States Senator 
say, "It's sewer-water, — mere sewer-water, not 
fit for a human being to touch." But if it is false, 

' In the final chapters on Progress, an attempt is made to add 
evidence on this point from authentic changes which our critics 
enable us to see and measure through the century. 



244 AS OTHERS SEE US 

why not answer it, that the people may have some 
authentic statement ? " Well," was the reply, "there 
is, of course, a lot of unpleasant facts so mixed up 
with these charges as to make it very difficult to re- 
ply." Yes, "such a lot of unpleasant facts" which 
no one dared to face in open public discussion. 
They were facts which did this service: they laid 
bare the whole organized intimacy between privi- 
leged business and politics. We had all been taught 
that our political corruption was in some dark way 
peculiar to large cities. Investigation during the 
last seven or eight years has destroyed that illusion. 
The large city merely gave concentrated and dramatic 
expression to evils that inhere in large business 
activities that depend on legislative and other favors. 
Public service corporations with affiliated busi- 
nesses like mines and other primary natural resources 
have set the pace in this subjection of the politician 
to private rather than public interests. That these 
powers should have become in recent years so 
centred in speculative markets; that business dis- 
tinction should be now largely tested by capacity 
to manipulate securities; that the most precious 
wealth-resources should be like the stake in a 
gambler's game, are dangers that only selfish interest 
or mental dulness now fails to recognize. "Bad 
politics" follows and reflects the deeper evils of a 
grossly unfair competitive business ; unfair in the 
sense that our excessive inequalities of wealth are 
known to be due largely to special favors or outright 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 245 

theft of public domain in mining, grazing, and 
lumbering. An excessive tariff is behind specific 
large fortunes "in iron." The tariff, together with 
rebates, has made several Steel Kings. Great 
mastery in the securing of rebates has made other 
vast fortunes. With a few distinct exceptions, this 
whole natural history of multimillionnairedom is a 
story, no line of which can be told apart from a 
political corruption which these businesses started. 
This corruption did not begin with the blackmailer 
or the people. These are developed as later and 
consequent evils. 

Better than with oil, mines, lumber, cattle, or 
steel, railway transportation is that through which 
we may best see this evil. Dr. Albert Shaw is not 
an alarmist, neither is he a general scold. He knows 
about our railroads. Without wishing to do them 
injury, here are his deliberate opinions expressed 
in his Review of Reviews : — 

"The mismanagement of insurance companies has been a 
mere passing trifle when compared with the mismanagement 
of American railroad interests. 

"We have a small and select population of plutocrats who 
control our railroads and have somehow managed to put into 
their private pockets some hundreds of thousands of millions 
of dollars through their ability to skim the cream off the 
country's prosperity. 

"Many of those in control 'have juggled with securities, 
have played the stock-market up and down, have played tricks 
with their dividend policies, have so falsified their bookkeeping 
as to conceal surpluses, and have virtually confiscated the 



246 AS OTHERS SEE US 

property of the confiding stockholders by the use they have 
made of the proxies which they themselves have solicited 
through the mails at the stockholders' expense.' They 'have 
got control of the American railroad system, have bled it un- 
mercifully for their own benefit, and the result is that it no 
longer serves the practical purposes for which railroads 
exist.'" 

Though himself seeing great objection to govern- 
ment management of railroads, he concludes : — 

"Whatever may be the objections to government owner- 
ship — and those objections are very great — it would be 
better than the indefinite continuance of an irresponsible and 
uncontrolled private management in the interest of a ring of 
plutocrats." 

That judgment is caustic, but it is not exaggerated. 
If we add to it, that the partnership between the rail- 
road and iron, oil, lumber, cattle, mines, etc., has 
been through local and federal legislation in such 
dark and covered ways as to infect the very sources 
of our political life, we have merely a further and 
complete statement of the fact. This digression is 
only to make the question a little more intelligent: 
Does Mr. Bryce take this evil thing fully and fairly 
into account? Seeing it all, has the bravery of his 
optimism good warrant? 

One cannot answer it with satisfaction, because 
it is uncertain how far he is looking to the future 
rather than to the present. He seems to be saying, 
as he faces the evil, "Ugly as it is, you will throw it 
off. Your buoyancy, health, and confidence will 
cut out that rottenness as we in England cut out our 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 247 

'rotten boroughs' and recognized debaucheries that 
were blacker than America ever knew." 

For this faith he gives two forceful reasons. First, 
the strategic advantage which public opinion has in 
this country. As compared to other countries, he 
finds its peculiarity in this, that our public opinion 
"stands above the parties, being cooler and larger 
minded than they are; it awes party leaders and 
holds in check party organizations. No one openly 
ventures to resist it. It determines the direction 
and the character of national policy. It is the prod- 
uct of a greater number of minds than in any other 
country, and it is more indisputably sovereign. It 
is the central point of the whole American policy. 
To describe it, that is, to sketch the leading political 
ideas, habits, and tendencies of the American people, 
and show how they express themselves in action, is the 
most difficult and also the most vital part of my task." 

This is a preHminary word in his Introduction in 
explanation of the detailed study of public opinion 
in several later chapters.^ 

In noting the powers of the President, he says, 
"Nowhere is the rule of public opinion so complete 
as in America, nor so direct, that is to say, so inde- 
pendent of the ordinary machinery of government." ^ 

The really great changes since Bryce's first edition 
strengthen every opinion he has expressed on this 
point. De Tocqueville finds the President almost a 

> Vol. II, Part IV. 

2 "The American Commonwealth," Vol. I, p. 63. 



248 AS OTHERS SEE US 

weakling in using public opinion. Ten years after 
de Tocqueville, the French Ambassador de Bacourt 
wrote his sister, "The State minds its own business 
so much that I have nothing to do." Mr. Bryce 
first writes : — 

"An American may, through a long life, never be reminded 
of the Federal Government except when he votes at Presi- 
dential and Congressional elections, lodges a complaint against 
the Post-Office, and opens his trunk for a Custom-House offi- 
cer on the pier at New York when he returns from a tour of 
Europe." 

As he comes now to a wide-armed welcome as 
ambassador, he finds 

"The Federal power in some of the most ordinary minutiae 
of daily hfe — when he buys a pound of meat, goes to the drug- 
gist for medicine, buys cofiFee at the comer grocery, or secures 
a railroad ticket." 

He finds the immense hopefulness of public opinion 
here to be in the fact that its directive power is more 
and more consciously active in the entire body of 

the people. -f^-i'i^.' ^ J •. ■ 

President Woodrow Wilson at Columbia University 
says of this extraordinary growth that — 

"In nothing has it grown more than in the development of 
the presidency. His cabinet becomes more and more de- 
pendent upon him ; upon his single ofhce, more and more the 
centre of the vital forces of opinion and political initiative. 

"The President alone is elected by the people as a whole, 
has no local constituency, speaks for no special interest. If 
he truly interpret the national thought and boldly enough 
insist upon it, he is irresistible." 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 249 

Professor Miinsterberg goes so far in agreement 
with Mr. Bryce as to say that "the parties with all 
their paraphernalia are merely the lower house of the 
nation, while Pubhc Opinion is the upper house." Pie 
says again, "Most of all, it must be insisted that 
public opinion is all the time following up these 
excrescences on party life, and that public opinion 
presses forward year by year at an absolutely sure 
pace." 

In no way has Mr. Bryce more helped us than in 
showing the folly of that long list of critics who glee- 
fully traced our frailties to the kind of government 
we had chosen. I tried to keep a list of the specific 
degeneracies that writers connected with our form 
of government. We had set up as a Republic and 
therefore were becoming "godless," "irreverent," 
"mannerless," "silent," "monotonous," "super- 
sensitive." We were "flighty" and "headstrong," 
"miserly in some directions and wasteful in others," 
all because we had cut loose from aristocracies. 
That five of our States repudiated their debts, or 
long threatened to do so, was an "inevitable result of 
democracy." Poletika gives his reasons why our 
inordinate boasting follows from our type of govern- 
ment.^ As he says, the effect of democracy is "to 
make men turbulent citizens, abandoned Chris- 
tians, inconstant husbands, and treacherous friends." 
Captain Marryat says, "Slander and detraction are 
the inseparable evils of a democracy." ^ 

» "AperfU," p. 155. ^ "Diary," Vol. I, p. 17. 



250 AS OTHERS SEE US 

We are shown how inevitable it is that we should 
consume such enormous quantities of cheap liquor, 
"because we are a democracy." Without the influ- 
ence of aristocracy, we cannot produce art or litera- 
ture. 

Of all this shallowness Mr. Bryce makes short 
work. "One of the most polished and aristocratic 
societies in Europe has for two centuries been that 
of Vienna; yet what society could have been in- 
tellectually duller or less productive?" He says 
these theorizers about democracy are like Daniel 
giving us a dream and his own interpretation of it.^ 

"Few mistakes are more common than that of exaggerating 
the influence of forms of government. As there are historians 
and politicians who, when they come across a trait of national 
character for which no obvious explanation presents itself, set 
it down to 'race,' so there are writers and speakers who, too 
indolent to examine the whole facts of the case, or too ill- 
trained to feel the need of such examination, pounce upon the 
political institutions of a country as the easiest way to account 
for its social and intellectual, perhaps even for its moral and 
religious peculiarities." ^ 

"Let any one study the portrait of the democratic man and 
democratic city which the first and greatest of all hostile critics 
of democracy has left us, and compare it with the very different 
descriptions of life and culture under a popular government 
in which European speculation has deported itself since de 

^ Professor Freeman writes: "It is absurd to infer that a 
democratic federal form of government has a necessary and special 
tendency to corruption, when it is certain that corruption has been 
and is just as rife under governments of other kinds." — "Im- 
pressions of the United States," p. 123. 

^ "The American Commonwealth," Vol. II, p. 612. 



OUR GREATEST CRITIC 25 1 

Tocqueville's time. He will find each theory plausible in the 
abstract, and each equally unlike the facts which contemporary 
America sets before us." 

Mr. Bryce's second source of confidence is in the 
character of our education which works through this 
public opinion. More than twenty years ago he 
wrote of the new forms of education in the United 
States, "as powerfully affecting politics, the develop- 
ment not only of literary, scientific, and historical 
studies, but in particular of a new school of publi- 
cists, who discuss constitutional and economic 
questions in a philosophic spirit; closer intellectual 
relationship with Europe, and particularly with 
England and Germany; increased interest of the 
best class of citizens in politics; improved literary 
quality of the newspapers and the periodicals." 
In 1905 he turns with still greater reliance to these 
educational hopes. His running comparison be- 
tween our best and the best in Europe adds interest 
to his estimate. 

"There has been within these last thirty-five years a 
development of the higher education in the United States 
perhaps without a parallel in the world. 

"The interest taken in the constitutional topics and eco- 
nomic questions, indeed in everything that belongs to the 
sphere of political science, is as great as it is in Germany or 
France, and greater than in Britain. 

"America has now not less than fifteen or perhaps even 
twenty seats of learning fit to be ranked beside the universities 
of Germany, France, and England as respects the complete- 
ness of the instruction which they provide and the thorough- 
ness at which they aim. 



252 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"Even more noticeable is the amplitude of the provision 
now made for the study of natural sciences, and of those arts 
in which science is applied to practical ends. In this respect 
the United States has gone ahead of Great Britain." ' 

That the remaining shadows neither discourage nor 
seriously alarm him is the message for which we have 
most to thank this writer. That his hopes for us are 
based upon the strengthening and enriching of our 
education as it acts upon pubUc opinion brings this 
cheer; a steadying and informing education is a 
remedy and a responsibility over which we have 
control. It is the distinction of Mr. Bryce to have 
shown better than any of our critics how direct a 
bearing this educated opinion has upon every des- 
tiny that is to constitute the enduring greatness of 
our common country. 

* "America Revisited," Outlook, March, 1905. 

These words too are reassuring: "The notion which has ob- 
tained currency in Europe that the people of the United States, 
conscious that they have become a great World Power, are plan- 
ning, and preparing to build up, a vast dominion over subject 
States or tribes seems ludicrous to any one who keeps his ears and 
eyes open in the country." 



CHAPTER XIV 

A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 

To Professor Hugo Munsterberg we are indebted 
for two books, one written for our instruction, one 
for the instruction of Germany. Each country is 
overburdened with prejudices against the other. To 
clear the common air of these absurdities, to help 
each to understand the other, to encourage and 
enlighten friendly relations between Germany and 
the United States, is the generous purpose of these 
complementary studies. 

This scholar has been so many years in our 
country, he has travelled so widely, his activities 
are so variously related, as to give him skill as 
mediator and interpreter. 

After seven years' teaching in Harvard Univer- 
sity, he published "American Traits," in which the 
direct appeal is to us in America. Hundreds of 
students returning year by year from German uni- 
versities learn something of the deeper life of that 
country, but the "average American ignorance" is 
not only dense but often increased by hurried trips 
through German territory. That they are frowsy, 
unpractical, and given to cloudy philosophies, that 
253 



254 AS OTHERS SEE US 

their food swims in grease, that their pompous offi- 
cials are perpetually interfering in your private 
affairs, is a mental picture very common in this 
country. The Americans' complaint of this petty 
interference I have heard oftener than any other 
criticism. We turn to Professor Miinsterberg to 
find him critical of this same evil in the United States. 
He complains of our "restrictions and prohibitions 
and a continuous meddling with private affairs." 
Our poUcemen do not come in to insist that the 
heating arrangements should be thus or so; they 
do not get serious and bureaucratic over the baby 
carriage, or over the way you carry a cane in the 
street; but we have our petty legal interferences 
quite as intolerable to Germans. We are used to 
these and do not notice them. 

To illustrate these international densities, the 
author writes : — 

"An American who has never been abroad invited me, the 
other day, to a German luncheon. I had to work my way 
through a series of so-called German dishes, which I had 
never tasted or smelled before; and when finally imported 
sauer-kraut appeared, and I had to confess that I had never 
tried it in my life and had never seen any one else eating it, 
my host assured me that I did not know anything about 
Germany: it was the favorite dish of every Prussian. The 
habits of the Prussian sauer-kraut eater are well known. He 
goes shabbily dressed, never takes a bath, drinks beer at his 
breakfast, plays skat, smokes a long pipe, wears spectacles, 
reads books from dirty loan libraries, is rude to the lower 
classes and slavishly servile to the higher, is innocent of the 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 255 

slightest attempt at good form in society, considering it as his 
object in life to obey the pohceman, to fill blanks with bureau- 
cratic red tape, and to get a title in front of his name." 

From the German side : — 

"How does the Yankee look in the imagination of my 
countrymen? In the German language the adjective 'Amer- 
ican' is usually connected with but three things. The Ger- 
mans speak of American stoves and mean a kind of stove 
which I have never seen in this country ; they speak of Ameri- 
can duels, and mean an absurd sort of duel which was certainly 
never fought on this continent; and finally, they speak of 
American humbug, and mean by it that kind of humbug which 
flourishes in Berlin just as in Chicago. But the American man 
is of course very well known. He is a haggard creature, with 
vulgar tastes and brutal manners, who drinks whiskey and 
chews tobacco, spits, fights, puts his feet on the table, and 
habitually rushes along in wild haste, absorbed by a greedy 
desire for the dollars of his neighbors. He does not care for 
education or art, for the pubhc welfare or for justice, except 
so far as they mean money to him." ^ 

The American thinks the German ''servile, reac- 
tionary, narrow minded," while the German believes 
the American to be "greedy, vulgar, brutal, and cor- 
rupt." The high task of the author is to make both 
peoples ashamed of this petty and philistine judg- 
ment. By patient instruction he tries to scatter 
these devils of misunderstanding by turning on the 
light. 

His appreciation and praise of all that is best 
in our life and institutions is found in "The 

* "American Traits," pp. 7, 8, and 9. 



256 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Americans." * As it is addressed wholly to Germany, 
it lies largely outside the present purpose. There 
are, however, few Americans who cannot find instruc- 
tion in every chapter. These contain some startling 
statements, the accuracy of which is very wide open 
to criticism. They are often statements, however, 
flatteringly in our favor. They are doubtless meant 
to be strong in order to reach the thick-skinned 
prepossessions against us in the Fatherland. The 
author, moreover, frankly defends himself for touch- 
ing lightly upon our faults and idealizing many of 
our virtues, because he addresses his message to 
Germany. He admits that the larger book is a 
"study of the Americans as the best of them are and 
as the others should wish to he^ This is, of course, 
only part of the picture, but it is for the author's 
purpose the truer and more essential part. The 
man who uniformly takes his fellows at their best 
rather than at their worst is not only a wiser but a 
far more useful citizen. The really great names on 
our roll of honor from Washington to Lincoln, with 
a kind of divine obstinacy, took their fellow-country- 
men at their best. The scamps and the half scamps, 
who have lowered life among us, as uniformly took 
men at their worst. To lift the discussion and the 
estimate of foreign peoples so that they can be taken 
at their best would revolutionize for good every 
international relationship. Nothing less than this is 
the spirit of this author's bulky volume. 

1 Published by McClure-Phillips, New York. 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 257 

In the briefer study addressed to us, the working 
of our educational and democratic ideals is kept 
chiefly in mind. We have the educator in the critic's 
role. Before dwelling on strictures and warnings, 
let us note the full heartiness of his appreciation. 

There is first the caution of the real critic in dis- 
crimination and avoiding that commonest pitfall — ■ 
loose analogy, as when he deals with the press in 
both countries : — 

"It is, for instance, not at all fair to compare the political 
German newspapers with those of America, and to consider 
them as mirrors of the nation. In Germany all the newspapers 
which have a political value are exclusively for the educated 
classes, while in America every paper, and especially those 
which are seen most, is written for the masses. Social eco- 
nomic conditions make that necessary; and it is, therefore, 
natural that the American paper makes concessions to vul- 
garity which would be impossible on the other side." * 

Even our hateful gum chewing is "mere imper- 
fection of the coordinating centres." Most foreign- 
ers have so misunderstood this domestic dehght that 
they have invariably mocked at it and reviled it, but 
now our "motor restlessness" gets relief, as it does 
in the use of rocking-chairs, so that this traduced 
munching which an unscientific Englishman says 
"straightway transforms a pretty girl into a cow 
with her cud," becomes dignified as the proper care 
of one's health. 

There is quite incandescent eulogy of the 

' "American Traits," p. 27. 



258 AS OTHERS SEE US 

American girl which the most ardent of our early- 
French admirers did not surpass : — 

"He [the foreigner] wanders in vain through the colleges 
to find the repulsive creature he expected, and the funny pic- 
ture of the German comic papers changes slowly into an 
enchanting type by Gibson. And when he has made good 
use of his letters of introduction, and has met these new crea- 
tures at closer range, has chatted with them before cosey open 
fires, has danced and bicycled and golfed with them, has seen 
their clubs and meetings and charities, — he finds himself 
discouragingly word-poor when he endeavors to describe, 
with his imperfect EngHsh, the impression that has been made 
upon him ; he feels that his vocabulary is not sufficiently pro- 
vided with complimentary epithets. The American woman is 
clever and ingenious and witty; she is brilliant and lively and 
strong; she is charming and beautiful and noble; she is 
generous and amiable and resolute ; she is energetic and prac- 
tical, and yet idealistic and enthusiastic — indeed, what is 
she not?"' 

* "American Traits," p. 130. 

The fine glow of this tribute has scientific confirmation from a 
source that ought to give Mr. Miinsterberg a higher opinion of 
Froebel. A child, still in the kindergarten age, wrote her first 
essay on woman. Her father, a professor of natural science in an 
Eastern university, had furnished the Darwinian atmosphere in 
which the little girl grew up. She wrote, "Men and women 
spring from monkeys. My father says so; but / says, women 
sprung further away from monkeys than men did." 

To be impartial one should also quote another qualifying 
opinion about a great multitude of American women whom the 
author thinks given to fads and intellectual hysterias. She 
"cannot discriminate between the superficial and the profound, 
and without the slightest hesitation she effuses, like a bit of gossip, 
her views on Greek art or on Darwinism between two spoonsful 
of ice cream." 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 259 

Of things more serious than gum and gallantries, 
we have an honest attempt so to state the national 
traits which have excited most criticism, that they 
can be seen in their relations and with some quali- 
fication. Even of our begrimed politics he says : — 

"The same complex historical reasons which have made 
the party spoils system and the boss system practically neces- 
sary forms of government have often brought representatives 
of very vulgar instincts into conspicuous poHtical places; but 
that does not mean that the higher instincts are absent, still 
less that the alarming accusations v^^hich fill the press have 
more than a grain of truth in a bushel of denunciation." ' 

He then makes adroit distinction between policies 
that are directly under the heavy pressure of self- 
interest (tariffs, trusts, free silver, etc.) and those 
that represent the general political feeling and 
responsibility. It is in this more general sphere 
that — 

"... the American in politics proves himself the purest 
idealist, the best men come to the front, the most sentimental 
motives dominate, and almost no one dares to damage his 
cause by appealing to selfish instincts. Recent events have 
once more proved that beyond question. Whatever the sena- 
tors and sugar men may have thought of it, the people wanted 
the Cuban war for sentimental reasons; and if the uninformed 
continental papers maintain that the desire for war had merely 
selfish reasons, they falsify history." 

One other passage must be given : — 

"The high spirit of the individual in politics repeats itself 
much more plainly in private life, where helpfulness and 

' Ibid., p. 28. 



26o AS OTHERS SEE US 

honesty seem to me the most essential characteristics of the 
American. Helpfulness shows itself in charity, in hospitality, 
in projects for education or for public improvements, or in 
the most trivial services of daily life; while silent confidence 
in the honesty of one's fellow-men controls practical relations 
here in a way which is not known in cautious Europe, and 
could not have been developed if that confidence were not 
justified. Add to it the American's gracefulness and generos- 
ity, his elasticity and his frankness, his cleanliness and his 
chastity, his humor and his fairness ; consider the vividness of 
his religious emotion, his interest in religious and metaphysical 
science, — in short, look around everywhere without preju- 
dice, and you cannot doubt that behind the terrifying mask 
of the selfish realist breathes the idealist, who is controlled by 
a belief in ethical values." ' 

After appreciation like this, it would be a poor 
return of courtesies not to heed the admonitions. 
They are not wanting either in number or in pun- 
gency. Even while he warns Europeans not to do 
us injustice or exaggerate our faults, he admits that 
we have still a good stock of the "more civilized 
forms of vulgarity." 

"The result is not necessarily, as Europeans often wrongly 
imagine, a general moblike vulgarity: but a bumptious ora- 
tory, a flippant superficiality of style, a lack of aesthetic re- 
finement, an underestimation of the serious specialist and an 
overestimation of the unproductive popularizer, a constant 
exploitation of immature young men with loud newspaper 
voices and complete inability to appreciate the services of 
older men, a triumph of gossip, and a crushing defeat of all 
aims that work against the lazy liking for money-making and 
comfort." ^ 

' "American Traits," p. 29. ^ Ibid., p. ig6. 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 26 1 

Again, what is becoming of our fine hypocrisies 
about social equaUty? There is no need to refer 
to our behavior to the Chinese since the sand-lot 
orator, Denis Kearney, roused Cahfornia masses 
against them, or the Indians, or the prevention of 
the negro vote. No reference is necessary to the 
open chase for foreign titles. The practical ignoring 
and even hatred of the equalities to which Hp-service 
has been given, may be seen spreading like a conta- 
gion through our entire system. Quiet and ordi- 
nary Americans, whose means permit them to build 
a better house, as far as possible from the poorer 
neighbors, are quick to discover that they "really 
can't any longer send their darlings to the public 
school." The company is too common. Schools 
now numbering thousands, supported by millions 
of money, have sprung into existence and are fast 
increasing. These are frankly based on a principle 
of social selection that is the very breath of an imi- 
tated aristocracy. The public schools in which 
such brave hopes were placed as the bulwarks of 
democracy are now in a sinister sense not good 
enough for the well-to-do. Though the education 
and, above all, the most needed element of discipline 
may be better in the public school, it is not good 
enough socially for growing multitudes of Americans. 
We are very ingenious in the use of pretty sophistries 
to explain the reasons why children must go to 
"select" schools, but no one need be deceived. Dr. 
Miinsterberg says : — 



262 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"Where is the equality in the inner life of America? Of 
course it is true that we have pubhc schools where all are 
equal; the only difficulty is that they are not in use. Yes, 
there is no doubt that we are fast approaching a state where 
nobody in a city sends his children to the public schools when 
his means allow him to pay for the instruction of a private 
school." ^ 

Or it is what the author calls "the pedigree 
spleen" which has now caught "the best material 
of the nation." 

"If a single family of Connecticut needs three volumes of 
2740 quarto pages to print its own history; if the Daughters of 
the Revolution have 27,000 members; if the genealogical 
societies Uke the Colonial Dames, the Daughters of the Hol- 
land Dames, the Mayflower Descendants, and so on, multiply 
with every year, — the aristocratic undercurrent cannot be 
doubted." ^ 

The organized pilgrimages in search of proof 
that our family origins are in touch with the proud 
and the mighty now fill the land. A learned gentle- 
man in charge of one of our genealogical societies 
tells me that to watch the good people who crowd 
his rooms seeking for aristocratic connections about 
which they can brag the rest of their lives, is to learn 
that human nature in this country is as full of toady- 
ism as that of any people who ever lived. One in- 
dustrious lady, after much expense and years of 
trouble, discovered a thread which connects her with 
an English yeoman. She hurried in agitation to the 

' "American Traits," p. 227. ^ Ibid., p. 228. 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 263 

librarian to find out what a "yeoman" might be. 
The answer was a little disappointing. She said, 
"I suppose I've got to put up with him, but I did 
hope after all I paid out, I'd find an ancestor that 
wore armor and a helmet." 

Another librarian tells me that it is one of his ex- 
periences to have these unsatisfied souls, after much 
seeking, come to him with the finger on some heraldic 
device that specially pleases them — they like its 
shape or colors — and say bluntly: "I've concluded 
to take that. How much is it?" When it is ex- 
plained that coats of arms are not sold in that society, 
"I sometimes tell them there are plenty of places 
where they can buy them, and I have never known 
any persons to fail to make the aristocratic connec- 
tion if they kept at it." To furnish very humble 
Americans with distinguished ancestry is an enor- 
mous business now in this country. 

The Boston Transcript began some years ago very 
modestly; but now with rhythmic devotion several 
columns of fine print are given once a week to this 
cult. The urgency is such that the editor now ap- 
peals to contributors to have mercy. He has to 
print regularly this warning : — 

"The pressure upon the genealogical department has be- 
come so great and matter has accumulated to such an extent 
that it is impossible to insert queries as soon as they are re- 
ceived." 

Thus the "pedigree spleen" grows apace in the 
land where "all men are created equal." 



264 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Another graver fault in this author's eyes is the 
American superstition that "almost anybody can 
do almost anything." Any young girl is competent 
to teach a Sunday-school class or a country school. 
Any one who does service for the party in caucus 
or on the stump is fit to be consul, though totally 
ignorant of the language, customs, and commerce of 
the people to whom he is accredited. Everybody is 
fit to be a representative, on the school committee, 
or any kind of inspector. In discussing Winston 
Churchill's "Coniston" a politician of large experi- 
ence in New Hampshire says: "The railroads have 
done much to corrupt the people, but there is a deeper 
evil. The common idea that everybody ought to go 
to the legislature and is fitted to go there, is what 
blocks the first necessary steps toward reform." Ac- 
cording to Dr. Miinsterberg, the greatness of Ger- 
many has been won by faith in the man of special 
training. We have practised this in all our most 
successful businesses, but it has been the bane of 
our political life to test fitness by a mere party fealty 
that bears no relation to the duties of the office 
sought. That we are now (as in the question of 
consuls) aroused to some sense of our long blunder- 
ing, is to this critic bright with promise. 

The name he gives to this superstition is "demo- 
cratic dilettantism," which has smitten us with "an 
ineffective triviality which repels the best men and 
opens wide the doors of dishonesty." It is thought 
to be the crudest absurdity to ask any man to be the 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 265 

mayor of a German city, unless he has thorough 
administrative training in city business. To make 
this office, as it is made in this country, the helter- 
skeher prize of factional policies is properly described 
by a former German Minister, Schleiden, who wrote, 
"American municipal politics will remain corrupt 
and wasteful until the people learn that educated 
ability is the sole qualification for city offices." Pro- 
fessor Miinsterberg attributes many phases of our 
weakness and troubles to this "chronic dilettantism." 
It works like a poison at the root of large parts of 
our educational system : — 

"We have instead a misery which can be characterized by 
one statistical fact: only two per cent of the school-teachers 
possess any degree whatever. If the majority of college 
teachers are hardly prepared to teach in a secondary school, 
if the majority of high-school teachers are hardly fit to teach 
in a primary school, and if the majority of primary school- 
teachers are just enough educated to fill a salesgirl's place in a 
miUinery store, then every other reform is self-deceit." ' 

This writer is saying only what other friendly and 
competent men have said of all but our exceptional 
education. 

In a report of the Royal German Commission in 
1904, Dr. Dunker writes of the average American 
school : — 

"The difficulties are avoided, mistakes passed by; fre- 
quently the pupils are given great tasks whose performances 
would exceed their power, and the school is satisfied with a 

' "American Traits," p. 76. 



266 AS OTHERS SEE US 

childish treatment of the subject and makes the impression 
upon the children that the problem has been fully solved. 
This results in quickness of judgment, self-confidence, super- 
ficiality, and dilettantism. . . . 

"Everywhere there is credulous optimism coupled with 
harmless dilettantism; everywhere high aim, liberal execu- 
tion; but lack of sohdity in matters of detail." 

These observations are, of course, made daily by 
our own abler educators, often in more uncompro- 
mising terms. But the business now is not with 
our own faultfinding. The essence of the criticism 
is that we suffer grievously from lack of thoroughness 
as compared to the German standard, and that, above 
all, our general education fails in sustained discipli- 
nary power. This lack of thoroughness and of 
discipline leaves us with a thousand coddling pri- 
vate schools with no severity of standard whatsoever. 
It gives the pretentious list of studies and the display 
of pupils on show days when the public is admitted. 
It tests education by its promise of immediate cash 
returns. That the nobler and more disinterested 
ideals of education thus lose honor. Dr. Miinster- 
berg lets us see in a passage which will bear much 
pondering : — 

"A lack of reverence pervades the whole community and 
controls the family, the school, the public life. The pert 
American boy who does just what he pleases may thus get an 
early training in democratic politics; but while he wastes 
the best of the home and the class room, he gets at the same 
time the worst possible training for the duties of life, all of 
which demand that he do later quite other things than those 
which he likes to do. 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 267 

" He will learn too late that it is a great thing to command, 
but a greater thing to obey, and that no one can sign early 
enough the declaration of dependence." 

That it is greater to obey than to command is 
nobly true, and it has to be admitted that the ideals 
of obedience are less popular among our boys 
and girls than dreams of domination over others. 
Neither is it quite a fad among our youth to give 
their signatures to "the declaration of dependence." 
One of our teachers, into whose school came a small 
group of pupils from South Germany, said: "They 
seemed for one term to be a different species. They 
had not been cowed, but there was a charm of def- 
erence, a delicacy of consideration, and a capacity 
to blush which stood out in strange contrast to the 
mass of our pupils. Within a few months, I could 
see that these pretty ways could not be retained in 
the new atmosphere." For this loss do we get 
some compensation in greater "self-determination" 
which this critic notes as one of our traits ? 

The spirit of reverence as expressed in the docility 
of the German child we cannot have, any more 
than we can have the ruthless discipline of the Ger- 
man army. Since it is so hopelessly beyond our 
reach, let us believe that there are some compensa- 
tions for its loss. 

The final reproof of this author is graver still. If 
the American is sure of anything, it is that he enjoys 
an amount of freedom of which Old World societies 
know little. The possession of liberty is our strong 



268 AS OTHERS SEE US 

point. But what does it signify to have liberty; 
really to be free in the large sense of that word ? Is 
the South free to discuss the race problem strictly 
and fearlessly upon its merits? Hundreds of the 
best Southerners will tell you that the political and 
social spectre raised by that issue silences freedom of 
speech. Can their theological professors deal boldly 
with the accepted results of scientific and critical 
investigation ? Can the Bible on one side, and Dar- 
win on the other, have open and bold discussion? 
There are no better men in the South than those who 
say that this is impossible, and that many years must 
pass before anything like the German academic 
freedom will be attained. In scores of Northern 
colleges of sectarian tradition this is also true. This 
is what Professor Miinsterberg has in mind when 
he points to the higher freedom in Germany. In 
this respect the Germans are our superiors. It is 
one of our humiliations that we still carry on the 
heresy hunt against men who merely try to interpret 
the elementary results of a scientific world scholar- 
ship. 

The other sphere in which our moral liberty suffers 
is even more important. Intellectual slavery is 
nowhere so dangerous socially as in our politics. 
"To the independence of public men," he says, 
"and to their loyalty to the commonwealth, party 
bondage is fatal." Of certain legislative bills he is 
told in private how bad and mischievous they are; 
but when they come up, no one " dares to say a word." 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 269 

The heresy for which men widely care is no longer 
theological, but economic, and even this word but 
half expresses the truth. The heresy for which blood 
money is now demanded is upon the surface political, 
but the unseen heart of it is business and property 
interests over which men are in conflict. It may be 
sugar on one side and Philippine tariff on the other, 
but the ordinary political contest is only an outer 
aspect of competitive struggles for desired properties. 
If people really value these more than they value 
other things, they will barter the spirit and the letter 
of the Great Declaration — all the stately syntax 
about equalities and rights — for the economic ends 
they have in sight. When that great dreamer and 
doer, Cecil Rhodes, said the English flag was a good 
business asset, he was putting in words, even if mock- 
ingly, what our most masterful business men system- 
atically act upon. Politics is a pawn in the game 
of strategic business control. It is this, and this 
alone, which explains most of the lawlessness of 
"the great interests"; but also the other most 
serious criticism of four other of our fairest and 
ablest critics, namely, the "abdication of intellectual 
freedom" under the dictates of party poHtics — De 
Tocqueville, Chevalier, Bryce, and Ostrogorski. 

They are also as a unit upon this other accusation : 
"The party ruler in America with his methods of 
nomination deprives the individual of his political 
powers more completely than any aristocratic system, 
and the despotism of the boss easily turns into the 



270 AS OTHERS SEE US 

tyranny of a group of capitalists." The paragraph 
modernizes De Tocqueville's chief misgiving about 
us. Ostrogorski/ who studied this feature of our 
life with a fearless impartiality that won from Mr. 
Bryce the highest praise, has drawn conclusions that 
we have to face or become convicted of inexcusable 
timidities. When he finds that the greater private 
interests act so promptly upon Congress that the 
freedom of individual members seems to be lost, we 
think of a commanding state, the pivotal state, — 
New York, — and her two present senators. Can 
any one point to a solitary hint of constructive policy 
that is traceable either to Mr. Piatt or to Mr. Depew ? 
Are they free to act even for the people of their own 
state ? They are thought of as serving henchmen — 
the one for a great railroad, the other for an express 
company. What two men have had such chances 
to know of the inner corruption of New York politics ? 
With all their knowledge of these things, has either 
of them lifted a hand to disclose or check these evils ? 
One of our critics asks these perturbing questions, 
speaking of one of our most famous senators, in whose 
state party politics was managed by a boss of notori- 
ous venality: "How is it possible that this senator 
should not know the practices of that boss? If he 
knows them and willingly profits by them to keep his 
place, in what is he better than the boss himself ? If 
he knows them, why is he not the first to cry out and 

' " Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties," 
Macmillan, 1902. 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 27 1 

appeal to the people against such corruption?" 
"The hardest thing to understand in the United 
States is that these poHtical leaders in Eastern states 
like Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Ohio, should con- 
sent to keep silent while a lot of journalists investi- 
gate and explain the evils to the public." Yes, this 
is hard to understand, and few of us ever heard the 
explanation. Our critics tell us that these men are 
in no sense free ; that they are bound hand and foot 
so far as freedom to act and speak in the large public 
interest is concerned. Senator Quay could plead 
with a pathos of disinterestedness, for what? for 
the reforming at home of a systematized party cor- 
ruption that has long been a by-word in the land? 
No, not for this, but for the Indians, in whom he 
had, I believe, a humane interest. But how safe 
and far away from home diseases these wards of the 
nation are ! 

The final Summary and Conclusion in the closing 
volume of Ostrogorski ^ should have a separate 
printing and be read by every American who knows 
the language. It is referred to here for its sturdy 
reenforcement of Miinsterberg's gravest indictment. 

We are familiar with habeas corpus and reckon it 
among the most precious of our political posses- 
sions. But this author asks us about habeas animum. 
We still deliver the body, but how next are we to 
deliver a free mind — how free the spirit from the 
dead body of party tyranny ? This is the summons. 

» Vol. II, pp. 336-741. 



272 AS OTHERS SEE US 

He says wisely that it is folly to throw the blame 
solely upon the party leaders. It is the whole men- 
tal attitude of the voters that needs to be unbound. 
It is this public, he says, that is now made to believe 
" that the citizen who follows his party bhndly is a 
'patriot,' and that the prostitution of power to a 
party is a pious action. These idols, as Bacon would 
say, must be destroyed. Men must be taught to 
use their judgment and to act independently. It 
is on the accomplishment of this work of liberation 
that the whole future of democracy depends. 

" In the absence of this independence and this 
\dgilance, demagogism and corruption have entered 
the house in broad day, as a thief enters in the night. 
Democracy thenceforth received a check, and not 
through an excess of liberty, as so many of its critics 
imagine, hiU from a deficiency of it, from a want of 
moral liberty in this government of free reason." ^ 

Again and again we have passages like this : — 

"And these men enter Congress as slaves of the Machine 
and the Boss, of sordid parochial considerations, or of power- 
ful private interests, industrial or financial, which are so often 
in league with the machine. One or other of these servitudes 
of mind and conscience, or even of all combined, is what they 
have to pay for their seat. The House, therefore, is simply a 
diet of representatives of private or local interests, and it has 
been aptly remarked that every interest is represented in it 
except the public interest." ^ 

* "Democracy," Vol. II, pp. 728, 729, 
2 Vol. II, p. 544. 



A PHILOSOPHER AS MEDIATOR 273 

We are not dealing here with irresponsible cranks 
or muck-rake journalists, but with friendly, impar- 
tial, and equipped scholars. Of the one now quoted 
Mr. Bryce could say that few men ever brought a 
more scientific spirit to his task. 

Habeas animum; to get the really free mind in the 
realm of politics, to enlarge every fearless activity 
of poHtical independence, is our supreme need. 
This warning is as if De Tocqueville spoke from the 
dead to say again what he wrote long since. Though 
in unsoftened phrases, it is the soul of Mr. Bryce's 
appeal for a manlier independence of party whips. 
Firm in his purpose to defend and to take us at our 
best. Dr. Munsterberg puts his finger on the same 
cancerous spot. 

It is as if these well-wishers spoke with a single 
voice, "There is just as much safety for your Democ- 
racy as there is moral and mental independence of 
party tyranny in your citizens." 



CHAPTER XV 

A SOCIALIST CRITIC 

Some twenty years ago a scientijSc teacher in 
England, Dr. Aveling, the sociaUst, came to this 
country with his wife, the brilhant daughter of Karl 
Marx. I tried to interest them in some of the 
obvious prosperities in New England, but the task 
was without hope. That fortune had a smile for 
this trade-smitten country; that there was well- 
being anywhere among the workers, these visitors 
did not wish to hear. For the mishaps, calumnies, 
dishonors of our business and political life, they had 
the hungriest appetite. But that any good was to 
appear on the horizon of a country so given to busi- 
ness traffic, was not to be believed. Both had open- 
mouthed credulity for every evil report, and as gaping 
an incredulity about everything hopeful. In this 
spirit they took notes, which appeared later in a 
bitter and distorted book. 

The veteran German Socialist and Parliamenta- 
rian, Liebknecht, was with them, but in far kindlier 
humor. He, too, thought we were going to the 
bow-wows, but were having a great deal of fun get- 
ting there. When he saw that the big stores were 
not swallowing up all the little ones, it did not make 

274 




H. G. Wells 
Author of "The Future in America " 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 275 

him sulky. Thus Socialists, like other folk, come 
to us with different tempers. To those of more 
open mind it is an admirable discipline to visit this 
country and see it with some care. 

A German professor (Katheder-Socialist) was 
here. He had taught for years that the state was a 
positive power that could be made to work produc- 
tively in a thousand ways for man's welfare. To 
manage railroads, mines, slaughter-houses, tele- 
graphs, was a small part of what it had yet to do. 
The state could be made creative. It could pro- 
duce values and equalities. This has not been 
the American idea. We have been taught that the 
Government is a necessity, like the policeman, the 
tax-gatherer, and the court. These stand for order 
and justice among men, but they are luxuries that 
have to be paid for by the private industry and the 
thrift of the people. I do not know that this pro- 
fessor returned to his own country with any change 
of view about the German government, but he told 
me that he had never in the least realized what pri- 
vate and unaided effort could do in creating a stu- 
pendous material prosperity such as the world has 
not seen. "You think of your government," he 
said, "as if it were merely to be supported like a 
hospital; as if it were a negation, rather than a 
positive thing. Your people set to work as if they 
had never heard of it. Your achievements are so 
vast that they are a kind of final argument. Your 
way may be, after all, best, at least for you." 



276 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Another Socialist came, of extremer type. He had 
believed and taught that combinations were every- 
where absorbing little industries. Our great pri- 
mary industry of farming, to which he gave special 
attention, was very upsetting to him. He found 
many of the bonanza farms being cut up, because 
they did not pay or would pay better subdivided. 
He was told that the progressive up-to-date farming 
was steadily toward smaller areas. His chief amaze- 
ment was the prosperity of the small farmer on good 
soils through the Middle West. "A more inde- 
pendent and thriving population than these tillers 
of the soil, I have not seen." America, he said, is 
"a. great touchstone for social theories. No man 
should become anything until he has seen it well." 

Mr. Upton Sinclair opens his new book ^ with the 
deliberate assertion that the great revolution is so 
close upon our heels that we shall be in the very 
throes of it within one year after the presidential 
election of 191 2. He makes his prediction as "a 
Socialist and prophet." So soon will the touch- 
stone of events be applied to him! Another pre- 
cipitate Socialist signs his name in a Boston club, 
"Yours for the Revolution, Jack London." In the 
club was another Socialist who straightway fol- 
lowed with his signature, " There ain't going to be no 
revolution, H. G. Wells." So different in its effects 
is the great touchstone America ! 

I once heard a bumptious person criticising a por- 

* "The Industrial Republic." 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 277 

trait by a clever artist in his studio. When the critic 
had gone, the artist made an unflattering speech, 
which ended with these words, "What that booby 
thinks of the portrait isn't interesting, but I sliould 
pay well to know what the portrait thinks of him." 
If it were articulate, what would the touchstone 
America say of many of its critics? 

I have sought diligently for American views of 
Mr. Wells's book, " The Future in America." That 
so many cordial opinions are expressed by those 
who have experience enough to judge it largely, is 
full of good omen. Very little criticism that cuts 
deeper has been written about us. There are pages 
(like some of those in the chapter on "State Blind- 
ness") which most Americans would do well to 
ponder long ; passages, too, like this, after discover- 
ing the hideous fact that child labor is actually upon 
the increase in the United States : — 

"This is the bottomest end of the scale that at the top has 
all the lavish spending of Fifth Avenue, the joyous wanton 
giving of Mr. Andrew^ Carnegie. Equally with these things 
it is an unpremeditated consequence of an inadequate theory 
of freedom. The foolish extravagance of the rich, the archi- 
tectural pathos of Newport, the dingy, noisy, economic jumble 
of central and south Chicago, the Standard Oil offices in 
Broadway, the darkened streets beneath the New York ele- 
vated railroad, the littered ugliness of Niagara's banks, and 
the lowermost hell of child suffering are all so many accordant 
aspects and inexorable consequences of the same undisciplined 
way of living." 

It is a book that many a reader will merrily skip 
through, thinking its claims to serious attention are 



278 AS OTHERS SEE US 

very slight. This is an almost pitiful error. For 
a century, perhaps, several books a year have been 
written about us, but not a baker's dozen of them 
deserve more assiduous attention than this small 
volume. It is the charm of "The Future in Amer- 
ica" that the author is just enough haunted by the 
magnitude of his task to be a little afraid of it. He 
does not take himself too seriously or fall into pedan- 
tries. He is very graceful in avoiding the hard 
realities that ask for too definite and cock-sure opin- 
ions. His polished gaieties serve him well in many 
a tight place, where a prosy literalism would leave 
him knee-deep in difficulties. It is a book full of 
imaginative insight, full of swift glimpses, as if the 
eye were aided by a powerful glass. Even when he 
looks upon a great question, like that of immigra- 
tion, or of the negro, he throws more light into it 
and about it than many who have lived long in its 
presence. Let us first see his attitude toward these 
two issues. They, too, are touchstones. 

The author has a keen and instructed interest in 
race problems. His eye, so quick to detect the in- 
ner taint in what seems flushed with health, is at 
once fixed upon the momentous inpouring of our im- 
migration. It fills him with foreboding. He sees 
that the more disciplined peoples of North Europe 
have become a tiny stream as compared with the 
broadening flood from South and Eastern Europe. 
That Constantinople should soon be the geographic 
centre of these human tides opens a gloomy vista to 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 279 

his imagination, because we are so afraid of adequate 
state regulation. He sees us thrusting the vote upon 
these raw peasants, but "that does not free them, it 
only enslaves the country." He speaks as if he were 
watching a continent struggling with indigestion. 
". . . the dark shadow of disastrous possibility 
remains. The immigrant comes in to weaken and 
confuse the counsels of labor, to serve the purpose 
of corruption, to complicate any economic and social 
development, above all to retard the development 
of that national consciousness and will on which the 
hope of the future depends." Very deftly he touches 
the points at which immigration adds to the weight 
of our burden. It does make the labor problem 
harder and political trickeries easier. It does com- 
plicate social development, and, most of all, it does 
retard the fusing of common social consciousness 
and will, that are indispensable to unified action in 
community life. 

The deepest reason why employers and people of 
easy incomes generally w^ant the immigrant does not 
escape him. He states it thus : " . . . that America, 
in the urgent process of individualistic industrial 
development, in its feverish haste to get through with 
its material possibilities, is importing a large portion 
of the peasantry of Central and Eastern Europe, and 
converting it into a practically illiterate industrial 
proletariat." 

Again, with the same firm stroke, he traces two 
of the heaviest shadows that fall on this race move- 



28o AS OTHERS SEE US 

ment: first, the effect upon the child life bom into 
the poorer and most cramped quarters of our cities. 
The parents come with the simple habits of country 
ways. They are diligent and of good behavior. In 
spite of some lying jugglery in statistical form, they 
are very free from criminal propensities. But their 
offspring, thrust into city streets for their first habit- 
making before the school begins ! — here is an evil 
sinister enough. The second is the inevitable 
coarsening effect which the new liberties and freedom 
from traditional restraints are likely to bring upon 
hordes of the fresh comers to our shores. This is 
his estimate : — 

"It seems to me that the immigrant arrives an artless, rather 
unciviHzed, pious, good-hearted peasant, with a disposition 
toward submissive industry and rude effectual moral habits. 
America, it is alleged, makes a man of him. It seems to me 
that all too often she makes an infuriated toiler of him, tempts 
him with dollars and speeds him up with competition, hardens 
him, coarsens his manners, and, worst crime of all, lures and 
forces him to sell his children into toil. The home of the im- 
migrant in America looks to me worse than the home he came 
from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is far less simple and beau- 
tiful, the food is no more wholesome, the moral atmosphere far 
less wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the im- 
migrant is a worse man than his father." 

A young woman from a New York settlement 
takes Mr. Wells to watch the patriotic exercises in the 
school close by. He listens, not without a thrill of 
sympathy, to the clamorous adoration that lights a 
hundred immigrant faces as the little flags go up. 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 28 1 

"Do you know," he says, "I too have come near 
feeling that at times for America?" Then he goes 
out from this glad consecration into the dirty street, 
where he stumbles upon "a heap of decaying filth 
that some hawker had dumped in the gutter," and 
the tine spell is gone. The barbaric disorders dis- 
enchant him, and he sees in the murky perspective 
of some future near or far three words, 

"lynchings! child labor! graft!" 

Then comes the tragedy of another problem, that 
of color. He looks into the Southland at the negro 
and his destiny, close coupled with that of his white 
neighbors. Here he sees even less hope. As for 
immigration, he admits that America may suddenly 
rouse herself to heroic educational enterprises that 
may lift the peasant armies into disciplined efficien- 
cies, that will make the vast invasion safe, but this 
riddle of the African so socially separated from the 
whites, with the coarse prejudices waxing rather 
than waning, what gleam of light is discernible here ? 
From all sorts of Americans he seeks information, 
only to be staggered by utter failure. He cannot 
get even "the beginnings of an answer." He de- 
clares that "hardly any Americans at all seem to be 
in possession of the elementary facts in relation to 
this question." 

In the mournful undertone of his speculation only 
one thing is clear to Mr. Wells, which is, that the 



282 AS OTHERS SEE US 

chief obstacle is not in the black man but in the white. 
How shall this same proud white man educate him- 
self to live in honor with the weaker people ? These 
weaker ones did not ask to come. Their fathers 
and mothers were stolen on the African coast and 
forced in terror and with immense atrocities to 
come to this country. Their descendants are now 
here with the blood of their masters flowing in their 
veins. Only a freak here and there will talk of 
deporting them. They are to remain in our midst. 
How can we whites educate ourselves into that 
larger tolerance that may make a common civiliza- 
tion possible ? How can we use our superiorities so 
that wisdom and statesmanship shall more and more 
take the place of inherited bias and passion? 

To Mr. Wells there is one unslain dragon. It is 
the dragon of a Christless and religionless race 
prejudice. He finds it as bullying and insolent in 
the North as in the South. How are we whites to 
rid ourselves of this great uncleanness? Nothing 
less than this is the challenge. 

Mr. Wells is not deluded about the black. He 
does not see him as a white man who happens to 
have a darkened skin. The indolence, thriftless- 
ness, and gay unconcern of the negro are familiar to 
him, and it is because he is aware of these that we 
read with more interest the following tribute to the 
best of the oncoming negroes. 

"Whatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I 
doubt if she can show anything finer than the quality of the 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 283 

resolve, the steadfast effort hundreds of black and colored men 
are making to-day to live blamelessly, honorably, and pa- 
tiently, getting for themselves what scraps of refinement, 
learning, and beauty they may, keeping their hold on a civili- 
zation they are grudged and denied." 

In this spirit he philosophizes, but always with the 
thought of how things are coming out. How do the 
negro and the immigrant bear upon the tasks of the 
next generation? He finds us wofully lacking in 
action that bears widely upon that future. We can 
dig ores and coal, fell trees, exhaust soils at a terrific 
rate, all of which we identify with "progress." But 
how is this frenzy related to the life ahead ? Not one 
of his graceful pages will have its proper reading 
unless this future society is held in mind. 

Mr. Wells is the man of letters and of science with 
a yearning for Utopias. He has a fine disdain for 
the thing that is. What may become of the fact, 
what may be made out of it, that alone entrances 
him.^ He is not to be persuaded to give an hour to 
the home of Emerson or to the resting-place of George 
Washington. Niagara bores him as much as the 
swift turbines enchant him. He is the first com- 
petent and unashamed Socialist to write a book about 
us. I say unashamed because he does not flinch 

^ Mr. Bryce in similar vein says of the House of Represent- 
atives: "Here, as so often in America, one thinks rather of the 
future than of the present. Of what tremendous struggles may 
not this Hall become the theatre in ages yet far distant, when the 
Parliaments of Europe have shrunk to insignificance ? " — " Ameri- 
can Commonwealth," Vol. I, p. 149. 



284 AS OTHERS SEE US 

from or shuffle with the logic of his faith. The 
whole conclave of our conventional idols — "busi- 
ness enterprise," "private initiative," "property," 
"trade," "freedom," "patriotism," bourgeois family 
and state — are to him half-amusing and half-mis- 
chievous superstitions. He is always the socialist 
with ample and generous tolerance for our illusions. 
There is no hysteria, no fuming, no frenzied invec- 
tive after the manner of your ordinary Socialist, 
against the predatory culprits called Captains of 
Industry. If these masters of our commercial fate 
step with seven-league boots, if they move and act 
like a Colossus dividing the spoils after their own 
heart, Mr. Wells falls into line with the common 
army of admirers. He finds them diverting and 
full of instruction. How else can a people be taught 
the baleful logic of a consecrated capitalism? If 
huckstering and market-dicing with high finance 
are to be glorified until they absorb the best talent 
of the nation, how are the multitudinous victims to 
be disillusioned except they see stalking among them 
the embodied results of their system? These giant 
overlords, staggering under their incomes, are the 
best possible object lesson to an envious populace 
that meanly admires them. Let the comedy play 
itself out before all eyes. 

He sees every one of our ills through the medium 
which the massed energies of the nation have created. 
This is business, everywhere business. Our ambi- 
tions and our achievements are scaled to this stand- 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 285 

point. We organize our dollar getting so that the 
general estimate of success is in terms of large owner- 
ship. This creates the atmosphere in which the 
very rich, simply because of riches, feel a prescriptive 
right, let us say, to a seat in the Senate. One of 
the most recent to enter this body is from a great 
state in the West, one of whose citizens says frankly, 

"Well, is our richest man; why shouldn't he 

go to the Senate?" It should be the one political 
body beyond taint of suspicion, yet some of its high 
places are bought as if it were a stock-exchange. 
Business masteries have so subdued our politics and 
our politicians that they are but the echo of what the 
stronger business men want. 

What chance has socialism in such a community ? 
Mr. Wells grows timid. Like a good bourgeois, he 
warns us against our own Socialistic preachers. It 
is his private faith that we are without hope until the 
world's chief business is taken from private hands 
and private profit makers. The community (town, 
city, government) must manage this wealth-making 
directly for the good of the people and for all the 
people. Yet when Mr. Wells looks into this same 
business in the United States, when he examines 
our politics and the spectre of corruption that is 
business on one side and politics on the other, he 
shrinks. Socialism is far too good for America, 
So busy have we been in gathering dollars that 
"nobody is left over to watch the pohtician." 
The boss, with his slavish army of heelers, has 



286 AS OTHERS SEE US 

waxed great amidst the general laxity. We have 
allowed him to become the "professional," whose 
exclusive aim is personal profit. The pearl of 
socialism, says Mr. Wells, is not to be trusted to 
such as he. "Under socialism all business comes 
straight into politics and has to be managed by 
selected officials. Think of giving Standard Oil or 
railroad interests to politicians as they now are in 
the United States!" It strikes him as grotesque. 

And here, to this author, is the essential tragedy, 
that we are so overpoweringly a trading people; 
that our distinctions, ambitions, energies, and edu- 
cation are so universally dedicated to the profit- 
making ends of trade. These habits are so nation- 
alized, so all pervasive that they cannot he kept out of 
any other part of our life. It would still be well with 
us if we could keep the trader's instinct confined to 
its own field, but it is our tragedy that the trading 
ardor, with its sister propensity, gambling, invades 
all other fields. Gambling is the sport instinct exer- 
cising itself in rivalry against another, to get some- 
thing for nothing. It is trade stripped of its decen- 
cies and restraints. Trade plus the license of the 
gamester thus takes possession of us. It first en- 
croaches upon politics, filling the convention, caucus, 
and lobby with deals and bargainings. To counter 
and dicker with blocks of votes becomes identical 
with the chaffering of the market-place. The spoils 
system is merely systematized trading. 

The church no more escapes than politics. It 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 287 

has to be commercially organized with clerical 
salaries, pew-rents, and selected congregations that 
reflect to a letter the social standards which rest on 
a scaled material prosperity. The poor are no more 
wanted there than they are at a fashionable dinner. 
From the petty gambling at the church fair to the 
social consecration of bridge whist, the stamp of this 
prosperity is deep upon us. It materializes educa- 
tion, the theatre, and athletics. 

Yet Mr. Wells feels no astonishment. We are 
cankered with "graft," but that is inevitable because 
we are a nation of traders, and trade is in essence 
overreaching. If you wish to see it as it is, watch 
the game of poker, — "a sort of expressionless lying 
called 'blufBng.'" In its essential quality, trading 
does not differ from cheating. "... the commer- 
cial ideal is to buy from the needy, sell to the urgent 
need, and get all that can possibly be got out of every 
transaction. To do anything else isn't business — 
it's some other sort of game. Let us look squarely 
into the pretences of trading. The plain fact of the 
case is that in trading for profit there is no natural 
line at which legitimate bargaining ends and cheat- 
ing begins. The seller wants to get above the value 
and the buyer below it. The seller seeks to appre- 
ciate, the buyer to depreciate; and where is there 
room for truth in that contest?" ^ 

"A very scrupulous man stops at one point, a less scrupu- 
lous man at another; an eager, ambitious man may find him- 

* "The Future in America," p. 123. 



288 AS OTHERS SEE US 

self carried by his own impetus very far. Too often the least 
scrupulous wins. In all ages, among all races, this taint in 
trade has been felt. Modern Western Europe, led by Eng- 
land and America, has denied it stoutly, has glorified the trader, 
called him a 'merchant prince,' wrapped him in the purple of 
the word 'financier,' bowed down before him. The trader 
remains a trader, a hand that clutches, an uncreative brain 
that lays snares." ' 

We have been sufficiently taught that the sharp 
higghngs of the market, the calculating strife between 
buyer and seller, were attended by incidental evils 
that take on here and there vicious proportions. To 
Mr. Wells these distinctions are the pious hypoc- 
risies by which sharpers cloak their thieving. His 
joyous tilting is not against the flagrance and abuses 
of trade, but against all trade, and the very nature of 
trade. It has been much and long believed that the 
exchange function in trade — in spite of excesses — 
carried with it immense common advantages. Mr. 
Wells strives to free us from this illusion. The 
trader, even the most enterprising and honest 
one, has only "an uncreative brain." He merely 
"clutches" and sucks like a parasite. 

All these judgments Mr. Wells, of course, brought 
with him. They are a part of his equipment as 
Socialist critic, and their value is very great for him 
and for us. They furnish him with a standard 
which he is continually applying to our country. 
He is not criticising us alone. To the Socialist, 

* "The Future in America," p. 125. 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 289 

England is as sick with graft as America. To him 
graft is an evil name for about all that England is, 
commercially. All her stately manors, all her parks 
and palaces, all her rent-bearing forms of property 
on which her great families fattened like parasites, 
are the quintessence of sponging and graft. The 
only difference to Mr. Wells, as he says plainly, is 
that Americans talk about their sins more openly 
and more vociferously. That we cry aloud, is our 
hope. If England should cry out about her own 
embedded graft, there would be more hope for her. 
It is our peculiarity that we are so all-in-all given 
over to profit-mongering. We are accurately the 
counterpart of the great middle class trading and 
huckstering England. We differ only in this, that 
we can out-hustle England. We are friskier, and 
the dead hand of custom lies more lightly upon us. 
But we are the hammering, shopkeeping, middle 
class of his own countrymen set in freer and happier 
conditions for our work. Voltaire summarized 
England in these words, ''The bottom, dregs ; the 
top, the froth; and the middle, excellent." Wells 
agrees about the dregs and the froth, but the poor 
middle class has for him no excellences. Its shop- 
keeping prosperities are but organized vulgarity 
and overreaching of your neighbor. As for our- 
selves in America, we have the froth, but it is a pu- 
trid imitation, and the lees are ever thicker at the 
bottom, while the saving middle already becomes 
stale. We have nothins; in common with the ele- 



290 AS OTHERS SEE US 

gances and responsibilities of upper class England, 
and so far, very little of the squalid deformity of her 
lowest classes. 

"America is simply repeating the history of the Lanca- 
shire industrialism on a gigantic scale, and under an enormous 
variety of forms. 

"But in England, as the modem rich rise up, they come 
into a world of gentry with a tradition of public service and 
authority; they learn one by one and assimilate themselves 
to the legend of the governing class with a sense of proprietor- 
ship, which is also, in its humanly hmited way, a sense of duty 
to the state. 

"America, on the other hand, had no effectual 'governing 
class ' ; there has been no such modification, no clouding of the 
issue. Its rich, to one's superficial inspection, do seem to lop 
out, swell up into an immense consumption and power and 
inanity, develop no sense of public duties, remain winners of 
a strange game they do not criticise, concerned now only to 
hold and intensify their winnings. 

"This is the fact to which America is slowly awaking at the 
present time. The American community is discovering a 
secular extinction of opportunity, and the appearance of powers 
against which individual enterprise and competition are hope- 
less. Enormous sections of the American public are losing 
their faith in any personal chance of growing rich and truly 
free, and are developing the consciousness of an expropriated 
class." ' 

"A secular extinction of opportunity!" ^ This is 
one of his easy literary felicities to show us that the 

^ "The Future in America," p. 80. 

^Matthew Arnold's statement is as follows: "England dis- 
tributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace. America 
is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Popu- 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 29I 

froth at the top and the dregs at the bottom are 
already becoming mdistinguishable from the middle. 
If we reply that very many of our ultra-rich do 
develop a sense of public duty, that they dower 
education, art museums, hospitals, institutions for 
scientific research, on a scale unknown and un- 
matched among other people, our Socialist author 
has his answer, Yes, there never was such free- 
handed outpouring, but it is too unrelated, too in- 
discriminate, too pauperizing. One most princely 
gift bestower is thus described : — 

"And through the multitude of lesser, though still mighty, 
givers, comes that colossus of property, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, 
the jubilee plunger of beneficence, that rosy, gray-haired, nim- 
ble little figure, going to and fro between two continents, scat- 
tering hbrary buildings as if he sowed wild oats, buildings 
that may or may not have some educational value, if presently 
they are reorganized and properly stocked with books. Anon 
he appalls the thrifty burgesses of Dunfermline with vast and 
vmcongenial responsibilities of expenditure; anon he precipi- 
tates the library of the late Lord Acton upon our embarrassed 
Mr. Morley; anon he pauperizes the students of Scotland. 
He diffuses his monument throughout the English-speaking 
lands, amid circumstances of the most flagrant publicity; the 
receptive learned, the philanthropic noble, bow in expectant 
swaths before him." ' 

lace nearly. This would leave the Philistines for the great bulk 
of the nation; a livelier sort of Philistines than our Philistine mid- 
dle class which made and peopled the United States — a livelier 
sort of Philistine than ours, and with the pressure and the false 
ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all the more to himself 
and to have his full swing." — " Civilization in the United States," 
p. 79. 

^ "The Future in America," p. 94. 



292 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Thus one by one the pedestalled gods in our Val- 
halla are "called down." There is no billingsgate, 
no rough handling, but only a good-humored weigh- 
ing and measuring of objects that are found wanting. 
They are not even cast aside, but put back in their 
places as if this kindly iconoclast said to us: "Let 
them remain until you yourselves find them out. 
Soon enough they must be replaced by quite other 
symbols." 

The American reader who adds to "The Future 
in America" the later volume, "New Worlds for 
Old," will have a message as insinuating and per- 
suasive as any that the literature of modern Social- 
ism has to offer. 

We watch his easy and sustained flight with more 
willing admiration because his truth-telling is as 
freely directed against coUectivist frailties as it is 
against the present system. He is indeed rather the 
enfant terrible in the house of the Socialist. 

Your revolutionist is in his eyes an undisciplined 
and half-baked person. Neither will Mr. Wells 
have any nonsense about a world sinking into deeper 
disorders and disgraces. Life, in spite of all draw- 
backs, is moving on and up. It grows sweeter as it 
lengthens. 

This quick-witted observer sees more and sees 
better than scores of others who have stayed longer 
on our shores and travelled farther. His social and 
scientific interests furnish an equipment for observ- 
ing society as it just now exists in the United States. 



A SOCIALIST CRITIC 293 

Our material strength and our political weakness are 
both phases of the capitalism which has been devel- 
oped to its highest point. There is nothing that so 
fashions our entire life, religion, manners, morals, 
press, and education as this same capitalism, and it 
is precisely this central and determining force which 
the trained Socialist makes his study. The one 
needed lesson that modern socialism has for us is its 
criticism. The logic of its full and positive pro- 
gramme, we should do well to hold at arm's length, 
but its strictures upon the present business and 
social organization contain truths that only the very 
blind will ignore. 

The most constructive statesmanship of our time 
has boldly taken its hints from the Socialist. He 
may mistake much, he may be wild in his exaggera- 
tions, he may draw crazy inferences even as other 
speculators, but he has this advantage — his spe- 
cialty of thought and study is concentrated upon 
what has come to be overmastering in this country : 
our business methods, habits, and ambitions, and 
the devious ways through which these react upon 
our individual and collective life. Moulded after 
these material patterns are the prevailing ideals, 
the scrutiny of which are his main study. 

Mr. Wells is one of the most luminous as he is 
one of the most fearless of these social arbiters. In 
"The Future in America" we meet the Socialist 
who knows a good deal about the dry economics of 
his subject, but knows it so well as to clothe it in the 
imagery and the imagination of the poet. 



CHAPTER XVI 

SIGNS OF PROGRESS 

That our "progress" is manifest and assured is 
perhaps the most confident of American opinions. 
A French critic asks : " Why has the France of to-day 
such sickly doubts about herself, while America, 
in spite of her prolific sins, has the boisterous faith 
that does not really fear any danger or check upon 
her forward movement? Even if your American 
talks gloomily, it is all upon the surface. He is at 
heart a robust and reckless optimist." 

This optimism, of which everybody is proud, gets 
sadly mixed up with most arguments for progress. 
It is the justification of optimism that has to be 
first shown. No one is quite equal to the task, 
because final proofs of progress cannot be given 
except in terms of character or of happiness and 
conscious well-being. But happiness ! Who shall 
define it in its "higher" and "lower" scale? It 
has been the despair of dialecticians wherever this 
subject has been discussed. 

I recall the sentence, "The age that has the most 
deserved and most diffused happiness is the age 
of highest progress." But who shall prove that 
the twentieth century is happier than the fifteenth? 

294 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 295 

or that the days of John Milton were happier than 
those of Socrates? The reign of the Borgias in 
Italy seems to us full of all sorts of terrors for aver- 
age men, but the studies of Taine led him to believe 
it a happier age than ours. He believed this be- 
cause the Italians showed at that time so much 
vitality. It vi^as the age of " magnificent and daring 
action." On the other hand, we are told that 
India has lost her vitality, and with it the power 
of great activity. Yet a Hindoo scholar told an 
audience in Boston that the India he knew was 
far happier than we of the United States because 
she was uncursed by our feverish activity. Quiet- 
ness and meditation, with the habit of not wanting 
too many things, were to him indispensable to hap- 
piness. We are likely to reject this Oriental test, 
but the reasons we should give would doubtless 
seem to this Eastern gentleman merely to beg the 
question. 

We are thus driven to other and secondary tests 
of progress. This is here justified because it is 
with these that our critics are for the most part 
concerned. They have to do chiefly with the con- 
ditions of social growth upon which "deserved hap- 
piness" in part at least depends. The points 
raised by our critics enable us to discern changes 
in these conditions that have very vital connection 
with social growth. 

I select first that part of the country about which 
the visitors were most in despair, the South. Nearly 



296 AS OTHERS SEE US 

thirty of them go there largely to study the institu- 
tion of slavery and its social effects. They are 
generally charmed by the manners and hospitality 
which inspire many cordial pages. Progress or 
the hope of it, few of them see. Mrs. Stowe never 
wrote a line so withering against the results of 
slavery as many of these foreign onlookers. That 
the very roots of industrial and political society 
under our form of government were already poisoned 
by the reactions of slave labor, — giving the whites 
contempt for honorable work, and turning to ridi- 
cule our whole theory of political equality, was the 
theme on which much high-wrought feeling was 
expressed. 

That it would end all dreams of having one na- 
tional life was believed by most of them. Then, 
each after his own temperament speculates as to 
the shapes the ruins will finally assume. A few 
make good guesses, but the results, as we now see 
them, would have amazed all these prophets. Social 
destinies are still deep in the shadows, because the 
"tragedy of color" has only changed its form. 
Yet there is no misconception so fundamental as 
to make this negro tradition in our day the deter- 
mining or primary fact in the future of the South. 
The essential evil of slavery was that the negro as 
slave gave shape and direction to the whole indus- 
trial life and, therefore, largely to the political life. 
Desperate as it now may be, the whole negro ques- 
tion has become secondary, while the entire new 




Max O'Rell (Paul Blouet) 
Author of " Brother Jonathan " 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 297 

order of free industrial life is primary and creative. 
This seems to me the most impressive fact in the 
South. 

Soon after the evils of "reconstruction," these 
changes in business structure and method began. 
Statistical measurements are at last accessible 
that are wholly trustworthy. From a date so re- 
cent as 1900, her products leap in value from less 
than one-half billion to nearly two and a half billions 
of dollars, cotton spindles from six to ten mill- 
ions, her assessed property from 5266 millions to 
8000 millions, her bank deposits from 87 millions 
in 1896 to 171 millions in 1906 — this is the ma- 
terial uprising of the South from the gaunt and 
awful poverty in which the war left her. But the 
growth of her educational purpose and achieve- 
ment, her enlarged recognition of the unities of 
our national commonwealth, are still more impres- 
sive than all the climbing figures of her industrial 
prosperity. No one can travel there without seeing 
that the Southland tingles with new life which 
breaks through all crusts and all restraints. Her 
one grief is the lingering tradition of the slave. 
Yet, in the whole best side of that race, the progress 
as figured in property acquirement or by sacrifice 
for learning is as hopeful as any page of recent 
race history in the world. 

Nor is it for a moment to be supposed that this 
special race burden is solitary or peculiar to the 
South. Largely a question of color and inter- 



298 AS OTHERS SEE US 

mingling numbers, it faces and tests every civilized 
nation. It is the supreme lesson that all people 
have to learn together. Any one who reads Olm- 
sted's masterly studies of the South before the war, 
together with the pages of that sagacious journalist, 
E. L. Godkin, a few years later, can test the strides 
the South has taken. Better than either of these 
writers, the Southerner Walter H. Page knows this 
subject. He knows it the better because he knows 
the North so well. Returning from a ten weeks' 
trip, he compares the gains made largely within a 
dozen years. Hear his judgment : — 

"I doubt if anywhere in the world there has been so rapid 
a change in what may be called the fundamentals of good 
living and of sound thinking and of cheerful work, as the 
change that has taken place these ten years in many of these 
rural districts. Many a farmer who was in debt to his ' factor ' 
now has money in the bank, a bank that itself did not exist 
ten years ago. The inherent good nature of the people ap- 
proaches something like hilarity. If you direct the con- 
versation toward prosperity, they will crack jokes with you 
about the needy condition of Wall Street, and remind you 
that their banks have money lent at interest in New York." 

A dozen years ago, the talk of the Southerner was 
continually about the romance and drama of the 
past. To-day it is not tradition, not even the terrors 
of Reconstruction, that hold his attention. It is the 
present and the future. Mr. Page puts the spirit of 
the new change into this incident : — 

"I asked a young man at one of the Southern schools of 
technology why he chose this training rather than training 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 299 

for one of the older professions. 'My grandfather,' said 
he, 'was a mighty man in theology in his day. He knocked 
out his opponents, and he battered the devil. My father 
was a lawyer and a soldier. He fought the United States 
by argument and in war. I notice that the devil and the 
United States are both doing business yet. I made up my 
mind, therefore, that I would change the family job and do 
what I can to build mills and roads in Georgia.'" 

It should be added that Mr. Page sees even greater 
encouragement in the renaissance of education. 

Since 1896, 1 have been nine times into the South, 
and I do not believe these words contain a single 
accent of exaggeration. With the skill of a good 
observer, Mr. Page does not take his reckoning 
chiefly from the favored border states, but rather 
from the lower South where the difficulties have 
been greatest. As one turns back to the gloomy 
conjuring of the older visitors; as one rereads 
the shadowed pages in Dickens and Abdy, one 
seems to ask for a stronger word than "progress" 
to tell the tale.^ 

We must of course be warned against the easy 
treachery of gauging real growth in material esti- 
mates. But these are not to be omitted if they are 
associated with other facts. 

That the man who travelled yesterday in an easy 

* In spite of much present opinion, the South was not happy 
under slavery. The most far-seeing of the critics constantly note 
the deep currents of unhappiness which that institution brought to 
the best men and, above all, to the best women of the South. 



300 AS OTHERS SEE US 

chair from New York to Philadelphia in an hour 
and forty minutes was any happier than Mr. Jerrold 
who bumped through, in a wagon with no springs, 
in twenty-three hours, we cannot prove, because 
we have no test for the sensations of either traveller. 
That Mr. Jerrold had to get out frequently to 
help boost the stage from the ruts; that he arrived 
stiff and thick with mud, does not prove that he 
was without enjoyment on that trip. The man in 
the plush chair may have been more disturbed by 
a delay of fifteen minutes than the earlier traveller 
was by a delay of four hours. Yet the change 
from twenty-three hours to two hours, from the 
bumping cart to the plush chair, is an improve- 
ment which goes down on the side of progress. 
The added comfort is no mean gain, but far more 
are the economies in time and human strength. 
When Madison was elected President in November, 
1812, Kentucky heard the news in the following 
February. This fact means much more than physi- 
cal difficulties of transportation. It represents an 
average of mental lethargy and indifference which 
we have outgrown. 

That a few years later than this, it should have 
cost one hundred and twenty-five dollars to carry 
a ton of coal from Pittsburg to Philadelphia, is 
mainly a physical fact. It has quite other signifi- 
cance, that when our first critic was here, a Phil- 
adelphia publisher should be seriously advised 
not to start a paper in that city, because there was 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 30I 

already one in Boston. There were those who 
gravely questioned whether the country could sup- 
port two newspapers. It is in the same class with 
the latter fact that in a prominent college one 
professor could teach without protest botany, 
Latin, chemistry, mineralogy, midwifery, and sur- 
gery. At this time the clergy in Boston were thrown 
into a frenzy of moral revolt by the announcement 
that two of Shakespeare's greatest plays, "Hamlet" 
and "Othello," were to be presented on the stage. 

Our study began with a whole order of social 
phenomena of this character. One of our critics 
at the beginning of the nineteenth century went 
from Baltimore to Philadelphia. He paid six 
cents per mile on the stage, two dollars and twenty- 
five cents per day at hotels, and was three days on 
the way. Another wished to go from New York 
to Albany. He watched the papers three days 
for a boat. When it was finally announced, there 
was a further delay of thirty-six hours because of 
the weather. He had besides to take his own 
bedding and food. 

Here is a description of a trip from New York 
to Philadelphia: — 

"We had about twenty miles down the Delaware to reach 
Philadelphia. The captain, who had a most provoking 
tongue, was a boy about eighteen years of age. He and 
a few companions despatched a dozen or eighteen bottles of 
porter. We ran three different times against other vessels 
that were coming up the stream. The women and children 
lay all night on the bare boards of the cabin floor. . . . We 



302 AS OTHERS SEE US 

reached Arch Street wharf about eight o'clock on the Wednes- 
day morning, having been about sixteen hours on a voyage 
of twenty miles." 

The Scotch Wilson, who had been nearly as 
severe on New England hotels, thus describes those 
on a trip through the South. 

" ' The taverns are the most desolate and beggarly im- 
aginable ; bare, bleak, and dirty walls, one or two old broken 
chairs and a bench form all the furniture. The white females 
seldom make their appearance. At supper you sit down to 
a meal, the very sight of which is sufficient to deaden the 
most eager appetite, and you are surrounded by half a dozen 
dirty, half-naked blacks, male and female, whom any man 
of common scent might smell a quarter of a mile off. The 
house itself is raised upon props four or five feet, and the 
space below is left open for the hogs, with whose charming vo- 
cal performance the wearied traveller is serenaded the whole 
night long.' " 

An Englishman with wife and child goes from 
Albany to Niagara Falls. The cheapest con- 
veyance he could get cost him one hundred and 
fifteen dollars, and they arrived "half skinned" 
from the journey. 

Yet it is neither the slowness, discomfort, or ex- 
pense of this early travelling which tests most fully 
the improvement. It is rather the safety. Arfed- 
son wrote in 1832: — 

"A traveller intending to proceed thence (from Augusta, 
S.C.) by land to New Orleans is earnestly recommended 
to bid adieu to all comforts on leaving Augusta, and make 
the necessary preparations for a hard and rough campaign. 
If he has a wife and children unprovided for, and to whom 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 



303 



he has not the means of leaving a suitable legacy, let him 
by all means be careful to insure his life to the highest amount 
the office will take." 

In 1834-1835 Miss Martineau found steamboat 
travelling in the West extremely dangerous : — 

"I was rather surprised at the cautions I received through- 
out the South about choosing wisely among the Mississippi 
steamboats; and at the question gravely asked, as I was 
going aboard, whether I had a Hfe-preserver with me. I 
found that all my acquaintances on board had furnished 
themselves with life-preservers, and my surprise ceased when 
we passed boat after boat on the river delayed or deserted 
on account of some accident." 

No man who ever came to us had more scientific 
caution in his statements than Sir Charles Lyell. 
As late as 1850, on his second journey of investiga- 
tion, he said : — 

"After comparing the risk it seems to be more dangerous 
to travel by land, in a new country, than by river steamers, 
and some who have survived repeated joumeyings in stage- 
coaches show us many scars. The judge who escorted my 
wife to Natchez informed her that he had been upset no less 
than thirteen times." 

I purposely select this test, because v^^e are at last 
being shocked into some sense of social disgrace by 
the monthly horrors of our railway butcheries. 

Our accident list is now as inexcusable as it is 
appalling, but man for man and mile for mile, 
travel is far safer than in the year 1800, and in the 
half century that followed. Until within a genera- 
tion, there seems to have been no general public 



304 AS OTHERS SEE US 

sensitiveness whatever as to these dangers. This 
growth of sensitiveness to what is cruel or socially 
harmful seems to me fundamental. But first let us 
select from the witnesses other hints of the condi- 
tions of a larger individual and social life. 

There are many perfectly trustworthy comments 
to show us the rise of wages that lifts the whole 
standard of comfort in the community. The builders 
of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, in 1829, imported 
workmen for twelve dollars a month. The em- 
ployers who paid the passage got in addition three 
months' labor for nothing. There are now classes 
of Italian workmen among us who earn enough 
in six months to make it worth while to pay their 
own passage twice across the Atlantic, and leave 
in their pockets more than these laborers of 1829 
got in the whole year. In 1907 I found Italians 
in a California quarry earning $4.00 and $5.00 
daily for less than nine hours' work. 

At the present moment Italians are on strike in 
New York for more per hour than they got in South 
Italy per day, and for nearly three times as much 
as Chevalier found Irishmen at work for in 1834. 
This careful economist says he found a good deal 
of the hardest work done for sixty cents a day. 
At about this time women in the Lowell mills 
worked from five o'clock in the morning till seven at 
night for fifty cents a day. As compared with Eng- 
lish wages, Godley finds even this surprisingly high. 

In 1834 there was a strike among the men doing 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 305 

the heavy work on Philadelphia wharves. They 
worked from six to six. I cannot learn what they 
asked, but when the employers met, they offered 
one dollar a day for work from sunrise to sunset. 
The men accepted it. Carpenters were paid there 
one dollar and a quarter for ten hours' work. In 
a small country town in New Hampshire I cannot 
now get a local carpenter for less than $2.50 for 
nine hours. 

I have seen Slovak peasants doing work about 
our rolling-mills for $1.50 per day who never get 
beyond thirty cents in their own country and for 
nearly half the year received less than twenty-five 
cents. 

From Seattle to Los Angeles one finds plenty of 
Orientals whose daily wage at home had been less 
than twelve cents. They land in Americanized 
Hawaii where they soon receive $18 a month. As 
they pass to Oregon and California, they are found 
working for $35, $40, and $50 a month. 

Thirty years ago in the South, a Frenchman 
notes that negroes who can be said to be "emerging" 
are receiving forty cents a day. The larger con- 
structive industry, like the railways, is now tempt- 
ing them from the old agricultural standards with 
wages at least twice and often three times as high 
as in 1870. This higher wage is much more than 
a material thing. It is the open door to freedom 
from desperate and slavish indebtedness to the 
truck-store. 

X 



306 AS OTHERS SEE US 

The year 1834 is, I think, the time when men 
agitating for ten hours in Boston were said to be 
"agitators." The city authorities refused to allow 
them to have a hall even to discuss the issue before 
the public. In 1835 the bakers in Philadelphia 
struck against working "more than eighteen hours 
a day." There was also a strike of sewing women 
against a wage scale of seventy-two cents at its low- 
est, and at its highest one dollar and twelve cents, 
per week. 

Of the poorer workmen, McMaster says : — 

"Their houses were meaner, their food coarser, their wages 
were, despite the depredation that has gone on in the value of 
money, lower by one-half than at present. A man who per- 
formed what would now be called unskilled labor, who sawed 
wood, who dug ditches, who mended roads, who mixed mortar, 
who carried boards to the carpenter and bricks to the mason 
or helped to cut hay in harvest time, usually received as the 
fruit of his daily toil two shillings." 

The man who "mixed mortar" and "carried 
bricks to the mason" is now called a hod-carrier. 
Within sight of where I am now writing a building 
is going up. Every hod-carrier gets daily three 
dollars and works but eight hours. In 1825 this 
class was getting seventy-five cents for a twelve- 
hour day. 

The usual reply to this is, "But they could then 
buy so much more for their money!" The state- 
ment unqualified is not true. Rent and a very narrow 
range of foods were then, of course, far cheaper, but 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 307 

to-day the average workman demands and gets for 
his expenditure at least ten things where he then 
got two. Including these, he gets far more for his 
money. A large part of his house furnishings, 
as well as foods for the table, did not then exist. 
It is to this far better housing and improved variety 
of diet that another step in progress for the masses 
of the people is clearly seen in these critical records. 

Among the few best tests of social bettering, 
what is fairer than the health of the community? 

It would weary the reader if I were to put down 
a tithe of the opinions on health and its conditions 
in the United States during the first decades of the 
last century. It is only the recent critic who com- 
ments on the good health of the American woman. 
Until the present generation it was as common to dis- 
course on our ill health (this chiefly of the women) 
as to note the use of the rocking-chair. The phi- 
losopher Volney is very curious about it and studies 
our diet and habits of eating, drinking, effects of 
climate, etc., to account for the phenomenon. He 
does not distinguish between the men and the 
women. His conclusion is in these words: "I will 
venture to say that if a prize were proposed for the 
scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the 
stomach, the teeth, and the health in general, no 
better could be invented than that of the Americans." 
The acute Chastellux says that above all other 
people we "heap indigestions one on another," 
and "to the poor, relaxed, and wearied stomach, 



3o8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

they add Madeira, rum, French brandy, gin, or 
malt spirits, which complete the ruin of the nervous 
system." 

James Sterling reaches this conclusion as to the 
cause of such prevailing ill health as he found: 
"The deepest-rooted cause of American disease is 
the overworking of the brain and the overexcitement 
of the nervous system." 

A Russian diplomatist, P. I. Poletika, here in 
1810, 181 1, 1812, and again in 1818, published an 
excellent book, "Aperfu." He has great admira- 
tion for the young American women, but says they 
are so delicate (" si frele et si passagere'^) that they 
seem on the edge of invalidism. He attributes the 
lack of health to our climate.* 

Alexander Mackay, in 1846, says of our women: 
"They are, in the majority of cases, overdelicate 
and languid ; a defect chiefly superinduced by their 
want of exercise." 

These among scores. Nor need we trust in this 
to foreign sightseers. There is plenty of undeniable 
testimony from our own authentic documents. 
Adams, in his first volume,^ writes: "The misery 
of nervous prostration, which wore out generation 
after generation of women and children and left a 
tragedy in every log cabin." 

Of our whole frontier life he says: "The chance 
of being shot or scalped by Indians was hardly 
worth considering when compared with the cer- 

» p. 154. 2 Hist, of the U. S., p. 58. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 309 

tainty of malarial fever, or the strange disease called 
milk-sickness, or the still more depressing home- 
sickness." ^ 

It was thought necessary by most of the early 
travellers to see life up and down the Mississippi, 
or through the thinly populated settlements. To 
find a healthy-looking woman was a surprise. It 
was usual to say that climate and "nervous strain" 
play their part, but it is also true that the meagre 
family income could not supply an adequate and 
varied diet. Ignorance about such diet, as about 
all sanitary measures, was no less a cause. That 
the standard of vigor has improved in the sixty 
years since Sir Charles Lyell's comments is about 
as certain as that our population has increased. 

Inseparable from this health improvement of 
the women is the observed improvement in the 
speaking voice. One could easily collect a thick 
volume on the disagreeable quality of the American 
voice. Among all the earlier visitors, there is not 
the least disagreement on this point. There is 
much wonder as to the causes that can have brought 
this about. Climate is oftenest mentioned. Also 
"nervous strain and consequent depression." The 
necessity of straining the voice in "calling for men- 
folk to come to dinner." The women, it is said, 
thus get a harsh quality which was imitated by the 
children. "Incipient catarrh," "prevailing stomach 
trouble," "constant hurrying and anxiety," are 

» Adams, Vol. I, p. 58. 



3IO AS OTHERS SEE US 

other guesses. All the causes are beyond our 
knowledge, but it is, I believe, fairly clear that 
some generations of nervous ill health goes far 
to account for this lack of resonance and sweetness 
in "the American voice." Miss Martineau grieves 
much over this defect and is one of the few to trace 
it to ill health. She says : — 

"A great unknown pleasure remains to be experienced by 
the Americans in the well-modulated, gentle, healthy, cheerful 
voices of women. It is incredible that there should not, in 
all the time to come, be any other alternative than that which 
now exists, between a whine and a twang. When the health 
of the American women improves, their voices will improve." ' 

Two recent critics express surprise that they 
find everywhere in the United States so many people 
with a speaking tone "as agreeable as anywhere in 
Europe." They speak of it as beginning and ex- 
tending, not yet as commonly prevailing. It is 
very recent that we were conscious enough of the 
blemish to admit its existence. Foreign travel, 
the presence of certain nationalities among our 
immigrants, the teaching of singing and voice 
training in the schools, have so far aroused this 
recognition that the way to its healing slowly opens 
before us. We shall soon have sense enough to 
"standardize" voice quality: first of all for teachers. 
No teacher with a harsh, nasal, or "complaining" 
voice should be allowed to enter a schoolroom.^ 

^ "Society in America," Vol. II, p. 200. 

^ I am told that this has already a definite beginning. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 3II 

A little later we shall not allow boys with snarling 
or grating tones to shout their wares on the railroad 
train or to hawk papers in the streets. 

There was much truth in a sentence just written 
in a London paper by an English teacher: "About 
one-half the Americans use tones that make you 
shiver. They will be shamed out of this only by 
hearing a pleasant voice long enough to feel the 
unpleasantness of their own." 

Two college girls from New England lived a year 
in Spain. One of them says: "When I came home, 
at least one-half of my own friends spoke so that 
I wanted to put my hands to my ears. Yet I had 
never for an instant noticed this, until I had been 
surrounded by people for some months whose voice 
was a positive pleasure to the ear." This illustrates 
one precious lesson our critics have helped to teach 
us. We were "taking it in" even when we were 
hotly abusing our instructors. Dickens's brilliant 
caricature left its lesson for improved prison methods 
and for better manners. Even the saucy Mrs. 
TroUope, whose every page left a smart, actually 
modified some of our habits. Men who sprawled 
in their shirt-sleeves in a theatre box, or thrust a foot 
over the railing in the gallery, about 1840, often 
heard the word, "TroUope!" "TroUope!" shouted 
in the audience. All knew amidst the laughter 
what it meant. Much in these criticisms entered 
into our common thought and helped to form that 
self-criticism which makes the better possible. 



312 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Most of the hardest strictures concern fraihies 
and imperfections that are easily accounted for by 
the newness, the narrowness, or the hard physical 
difficulties in the surrounding life. It was usually 
the point of the unsympathetic critic that our char- 
acter and institutions were such that we could not 
free ourselves from the disorders. 

It is a very different sign, but not less favorable, 
that so many of the early students of America be- 
lieved that our democracy as a form of government 
chokes and hinders opportunity for the growth of 
higher, disinterested faculties. Science, art, letters, 
all the graces and real distinctions of civilization 
were, as they tell us, under baleful handicap, be- 
cause we were committed to a democracy. 

In nothing has the tone of the critic undergone 
profounder change than as regards this same word 
"opportunity," opportunity for the highest as well 
as for the commonest. St. Gaudens, the sculptor, 
has finished his work, and foreign artists are telling 
us that, with the exception of the French Rodin, 
the American had no superior in the world. Sir 
Robert Ball, the Astronomer-Royal of Ireland, 
recently left us. He is reported as saying that no 
higher astronomical work is done in Europe than 
here. 

In 1830 it was written of us: "They have neither 
made any music nor do they show the slightest 
appreciation of it. Even their 'Yankee Doodle' 
and 'Hail Columbia' were not written by Yankees." 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 313 

The French composer, Saint-Saens, was last year 
in this country. "Before I came here," he says, 
"people told me a great many unpleasant things 
about the New World. 'You won't like America,' 
they said. 'Everything over there will shock you 
and grate upon your artistic sensibilities.'" He 
now reports (not for the American interviewer, 
but in the Paris Figaro) his delight and surprise: 
" Everywhere I found excellent orchestras — every- 
where excellent conductors." 

Mr. Bryce's tribute to our higher education as on 
a level with the best that Europe offers^ is in the 
same key. 

If opportunity, as an inspirer of faculty, be made 
the test of progress, we gladly accept it. The pres- 
ent-day voyager is indeed the first to use it in the 
larger sense, as characteristic of this country. "If 
you ask me," says one, "in what the United States 
differs from Europe, one word expresses it, 'Op- 
portunity.'" One entitles a chapter "The Land 
of Opportunity." ^ A Socialist friend is very im- 
patient with what he calls "all this fine talk about 
opportunity" in this country. Have we not sixty 
thousand tramps, grewsome poverty, and all the 
shame of the sweatshop and child labor? Yes, far 
too much of this shame is ours, but "opportunity" 
is a relative term. What land or people offers 
more to a larger part of its inhabitants? The 

' The title of a German book is " The Land of Limitless 
Opportunity." 



314 AS OTHERS SEE US 

world's practical judgment about this has to be 
taken. Since our story began, some twenty-five 
millions of people at a good deal of risk and sacrifice 
have left their homes to come here. They came 
from all parts of the world and the pressure increases 
from year to year. It increases because those who 
have tried the country write back to their friends 
to follow them. The chief cause of immigration 
is the story which those continue to tell who have 
put the chances here to trial. No more final test 
is conceivable than this, that (as compared to other 
countries) the world's millions have found it, and 
still find it, the land of opportunity. An English 
consul, long in this country, says the charge of the 
English that the Irish are shiftless and ineffective 
at their tasks in Ireland has much truth, but he 
adds, "The moment the Irishman touches American 
soil, he works, and works with the best of them, 
because all sorts of chances open out to him and 
his children." 

Now, what more than this same "opportunity" 
enters into and constitutes a people's hopefulness, 
courage, and happiness? If we are careful in our 
thought to add to the fact of economic opportunity 
the fact of the rapidly growing educational oppor- 
tunity, hopeful chances never were greater in our 
history than now — I mean, for a larger proportion 
of the population. 

Many who admit this are likely to add, " But this 
opportunity is closing up, it will soon be at an end." 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 315 

No prophecy at the time it is spoken can be dis- 
proved, but the pages of our critics contain a great 
deal of testimony that bears directly on the point. 
Decade by decade through the century, our visitors 
are stoutly assured by the best-informed Americans, 
that the limit of assimilating immigrants has been 
reached. "It must be stopped or the Republic 
is at an end." This gloomy view held stiffly in 
1825 ; it was rampant when De Tocqueville and 
Miss Martineau were here; it reached a crisis of 
alarm in 1840. "America," says one, "is always 
going to the devil, but never gets there." Yes, it 
has always been going to the devil, because of some- 
thing. It is worth while to note some of these 
ever impending calamities. 

Most of the first visitors heard from conservative 
and leading citizens that the President was to be- 
come a "despot" or "the slave of foreign potentates" ; 
that the Senate was sure to become an oligarchy, 
because it sat six years and was not elected directly 
by the people; that the central government would 
swallow up the states or intimidate them by the 
army; even the House of Representatives would 
be made up of the rich and would tyrannize over 
the people; the small states would be at odds with 
the large states and lose their sovereign rights; 
Rhode Island could not maintain itself against 
New York. Bryce says of these dark misgivings, 
"Not one has proved true." There were many 
fears because of the size of our country. In a small 



3l6 AS OTHERS SEE US 

democracy, it was said, you may extend power to 
the people, because the area of the problem is under 
control. With the vast domain of the United States, 
the interests will be so diverse and so conflicting 
that the factional spirit cannot be held in restraint. 
Bryce says very definitely that this factional unrest 
has, as a fact, "proved less intense over the large 
area of the Union than it did in the Greek republics 
of antiquity; to-day the demon of faction is less 
powerful in the parties than at any previous date 
since the so-called Era of Good Feeling in 1820." 
Again, we were to be hopelessly vacillating in our 
foreign policy. Democracy, it was said, is "like 
a drunken man on horseback, falling now on this 
side, now on that." But Bryce will not even admit 
that, at our worst, we outdid most monarchies. 
"Royal caprice, or the influence of successive 
favorites, has proved more pernicious in absolute 
monarchies than popular fickleness in republics." 
With more conviction still, he says of our later years 
that "the foreign policy of the United States has 
been singularly consistent." This criticism, that we 
should be feeble and inadequate in foreign policy, 
was repeated and believed until the very close of 
the nineteenth century. But when commanding 
necessities came upon us, the man equipped for the 
new exigencies appeared in John Hay. We were 
told at his death by a foreign diplomat that in the 
whole field of world politics Mr. Hay had no su- 
perior. I heard it predicted that his successor 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 317 

could not be found. Elihu Root did not have to 
be found, he was at hand. 

Another dire prediction was that with so many 
states, dangerous and irresponsible experiments 
would be tried. Especially would states here and 
there legislate against private property, putting 
the whole basis of society in peril. We now see 
that this very experimental feature of state legisla- 
tion has proved to be an advantage, and as for the 
perils to private property, Bryce finds the prediction 
wholly false. 

Basil Hall was told that the rock on which we 
were to split was the change in our inheritance laws 
whereby all the children get their equal share, in- 
stead of the oldest son getting it all. This was to 
destroy the saving social influence of the family and 
property. This fear now sounds to us merely funny. 

Giving equality of rights to women (first appear- 
ing in the youth of Lucy Stone) was also an in- 
novation sure to introduce "a conflict of interests 
— a lack of family unity — that no society could 
stand." Woman has not won a right or an equality 
that has not stood for progress. 

That the church should be separated from the 
state was another fatal step to bring in ruin. For 
more than a generation our visitors were told that 
the catastrophe always close at hand is the presence 
of Roman Cathohcs. 

I once had occasion to ask an aged man, whom 
his fellow-citizens counted as one of their wisest, 



3l8 AS OTHERS SEE US 

some question about our social difficulties. When 
he had given his opinion, he added: "I suppose 
I am the more hopeful because my seventy years 
of pretty clear memory cover so many 'shipwrecks 
of the Republic' My father was a hard-headed 
man, and nothing was more impressed upon my 
youth by him and his friends who came to us than 
the absolutely certain destruction of our govern- 
ment by the Catholics. I have lived to see that 
every one of their alarms was an entirely false one. 
As this has been true of a great many other scares, 
I have got into a pretty comfortable frame of mind 
about this country." He added, "Of course, some- 
thing awful may happen to-morrow, but I am going 
to let the other man do the worrying." I use this 
because, better than any words of mine, it sums 
up the century of testimony on the approaching 
evils that were to overwhelm us. 

De Tocqueville saw an impending peril from the 
growing "tyranny of the majority." How brill- 
iantly he proved this ! We now see that the proof 
had one defect — it wasn't true. How often it 
has been a glowering "Caesarism" close at hand. 
Bryce notices this and thus writes, "Caesarism is 
the last danger to menace America." 

That before the death of George Washington, 
De Warville should see our doom in the "ravages 
of luxury" already rampant, sounds as droll to us 
as that a great number of enlightened people be- 
lieved the Republic in immediate danger because 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 319 

of that very innocent society of the Cincinnati, 
or as the fears expressed to Miss Martineau, be- 
cause young men were leaving the cities for the 
country districts. The "decay of rehgion" was, 
of course, at all times working our early ruin. 

Another form which the fear took was the cer- 
tainty of "disrupting religious quarrels" because 
of the increase of Protestant sects. The Catholic 
Professor Klein comes here to find us so tolerant 
in this respect as to set a splendid example to the 
world. He wishes France could imitate us. 

It should calm us a little that so many people in 
the first half of the last century were dejected about 
the "servant question." There has not been a 
decade since colonial times in which this frowning 
difficulty has not seemed to multitudes of home- 
keepers a despairing problem.^ "The increase 
of intemperance" is another spectre constantly 
appearing in our story. A long chapter would 
be insufficient to show the clear and impressive 
evidence that, however intemperate we now are, the 
improvement in drinking habits is beyond a doubt. 

There is one more shape which our early undoing 
takes on that is perhaps more instructive and more 
encouraging than any other. It is the agitated feel- 

1 The work of the servant a century ago is thus depicted : "She 
mended the clothes, she did up the ruffs, she ran errands from one 
end of the town to the other, she milked the cows, made the butter, 
walked ten blocks for a pail of water, spun flax for the family 
linen, and when the year was up received ten pounds (50 dollars) 
for her wages." 



320 AS OTHERS SEE US 

ing for more than a generation that we could not 
possibly survive the growth of "sectional hatreds." 
It is a feat of the "sympathetic imagination" quite 
beyond us of to-day, to appreciate what these sec- 
tional hatreds and jealousies were in the first forty 
years with which our criticisms deal. No opera 
bouffe could outdo many of these sober records 
of sectional spite. Trevelyan shows what this 
local prejudice meant among our soldiers in the 
Revolution. A military patriot from New Jersey 
gives his opinion of the corrupting influence of 
Pennsylvania soldiers. They would, he says, "be 
pejorated by having been fellow-soldiers with that 
discipline-hating, good-living-loving, to eternal fame 
damned, coxcombical crew we lately had from 
Philadelphia." This English historian adds that 
this amiable communication was from no less a man 
than General Livingston, and that it "was one 
among a hundred others which betoken a condition 
of feeling productive of endless scandal and im- 
measurable danger." 

I had to look through a good many of our own 
history books in the effort to confirm the dire opin- 
ions which travellers record about these geographi- 
cal animosities.^ They record so many of them 
that only the briefest illustrations can here be given. 
One reports the president of Harvard College (the 
historian Sparks) as "much dispirited on account 
of California and her attitude." In a letter to De 

1 See, for example, ''American Revolution," Vol. II, p. 196. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 32 1 

Tocqueville he writes, "Where will this end and 
how are such accessions and discordant materials 
to be held together in a confederated republic?" 
Marryat gives these "acrid jealousies" as a reason 
why a traveller cannot trust a bit of evidence that 
he gets in one part of the country about any other 
part of it. "The people of Connecticut will not 
allow that there is anything commendable or decent 
in New York." The German, F. J. Grund, is so 
impressed by this that he falls into a speculative 
nightmare. Through these prophetic mists he sees 
in the near future our collapse as a nation. He says : 
"I imagined myself somewhere near the Hudson 
or the Delaware in the midst of a large flourishing 
city, besieged, stormed, and finally carried by a 
victorious Western army." ^ It was against the 
playing upon these sectional discords that Webster 
spoke his great words, "There are no AUeghanies in 
my politics." 

That we have grown in those integrities that con- 
stitute progress is not wholly proved by the kind 
of testimony just given. But it is a history of doubt- 
ing and fearful opinions which we may read with 
a good deal of wholesome instruction and encour- 
agement. 

Such weight as this story of pessimistic appre- 
hension possesses, we must take over into the final 
chapter. We shall see there the bearing of what our 
critics reveal on the gravest dangers to Democracy, 

* "Aristocracy in America," Francis J. Grund, London, 1839. 
Y 



CHAPTER XVII 

SIGNS OF PROGRESS — Conthiued 

In a lecture on this coy subject of Progress, I sat 
beside an expectant stranger who hstened with lessen- 
ing attention for about twenty minutes. Then, with 
visible irritation, he reached for his hat, saying, 
"I'm too busy to listen any longer to this infernal 
pig-iron theory of progress." 

It was a true description of the discourse. It was 
progress in terms of pig-iron and kindred material 
products, and yet this waspish auditor was not alto- 
gether fair to the lecturer. His figures had a kind of 
poetry of their own, as one watched the graphic tables 
through which the story was told. It yet seemed to 
me to stand for progress, that this impatient hearer 
was unfed by all the dazzling accumulations. He 
had heard the tale of our material greatness so often, 
that he wanted other proofs. Is the time never to 
come, he seemed to ask, when we can safely take 
the pig-iron side of our civilization for granted? 
We have heard the critics find a deal of fault with 
our harping on all manner of bignesses and rapidities. 
If social movement has a right direction in America, 
if there is the movement of growth and improvement, 

322 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 323 

appeal has to be made to something besides bigness 
or swiftness. Questions mainly about the quality 
of things have to be asked, and not alone about the 
quality of Ihings, but about the quality of whatever 
constitutes the moral and intellectual temper of 
our people and institutions. For example, is there 
among our citizens increase of public spirit as against 
sectional narrowness ? Is there improvement in the 
public taste and manners? Is educational oppor- 
tunity broadening, and the standard of education 
rising? Are we more ashamed of bluster and pre- 
tence? Is the public quicker to condemn the tur- 
pitude in business and public office? Is there a 
growing decency in our politics ? Is the Press — 
"that test of democracy" — better or worse? 

These are some of the hard questions that must be 
raised and in some way answered before the case 
for progress can be made out. 

Several of these questions have already been hope- 
fully answered by our critics. For more than half 
of the nineteenth century, the best of them are full 
of doubts about our future, so far as all ideals of mind 
and heart are concerned. Decade by decade the 
tone has changed until, toward the close of the 
century, we have from them ungrudging admission 
that the institutions and the people of the United 
States have far outstripped expectations, so far as 
education, science, and many of the arts are con- 
cerned. The last quarter of a century has revealed 
other hungers and other capacities that are classed 



324 AS OTHERS SEE US 

in every country among the things of the spirit. 
In successive chapters, we have seen how ungrudg- 
ingly these higher attainments have been recognized 
by the ablest men and women who have told their 
story in all sorts of "Impressions of America." 
About two things they hesitate, — our politics and 
our press. 

Let us look first at the press. It would have dis- 
heartening significance if this were failing us; if it 
were, as one often hears, becoming a meaner rather 
than a nobler influence; if, taken as a whole, it were 
on the devil's side. For a hundred years it has been 
singled out as an object of vituperation. It was 
"The Daily Bulletin from the sick-bed of civiliza- 
tion." It has, says another, turned us into the 
" Gehenna of the United States." In 1898 a foreign 
scholar wrote : "I ask but one proof that civilization 
in the United States is a failure. Her press alone 
gives you more proof than you require." Let us 
accept the test, and allow the critics, with a little 
nudging, to answer the question. 

The above tone against the press continues until a 
few exceptions begin to be noted near the middle of 
the century. But the press in general gets little 
quarter until very recent times. Even now, nothing 
except our politics excites more critical condemna- 
tion. The average visitor buys a batch of the more 
notorious journals. On the headlines and brawling 
sensational features he makes up his little budget 
of comments. One of them writes, " If I wished to 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 325 

convince any rational being that the ruin of democ- 
racy is certain, I should see that he spent a few 
evenings reading these sheets." This is as if one 
were to test the excellence of the Dresden Gallery 
by the dozen worst canvases on its walls, or a 
people's health by visiting the hospitals. Just 
above this type of observer is one who discriminates 
so far as to select in the East and West a group 
of papers that are admitted to be admirable, and 
to this extent the judgment is qualified. Matthew 
Arnold and Professor von Hoist found certain 
journals in the United States as able as any printed 
in Europe, but scarcely before the twentieth century 
has any one attempted to study our press as a whole. 
A simple incident shows what this more careful 
and discriminating study produces in way of criti- 
cism. 

Two years ago an author and editorial writer on 
one of the London papers came to investigate this 
subject. I begged him to include in his examina- 
tion not alone the dailies, but the weekly, the fort- 
nightly, and the monthly products. The World's 
Work, McClure^s, Review of Reviews, The Outlook, 
Collier's, The Ladies' Home Journal, The World- 
To-day, The Youth's Companion, The Independent, 
and a dozen others. Many of these summarize 
news and cope with every besetting problem as 
the older magazines that do us so much honor 
could not attempt. They are as integrally a part 
of our press as a sheet with five daily editions. 



326 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Some of these magazines are said to be given to 
muck-raking and to sensations. If the charge is 
true, it is a use of the rake that we need as sorely 
as the crippled or the sick need surgeons and doctors. 
The few have always known the existence and the 
nature of our real social perils, but methods of 
secrecy, created by the winners in our competitive 
system, have prevented the people as a whole from 
having the least intellectual grasp of ills from which 
they most suffer. One by one these eating sores, 
with the secrecy which sheltered them, are being 
laid bare to us all. 

In this initial work of regeneration, the best of 
our dailies have had their influence immeasurably 
increased by periodicals of the type partially named. 
The cheap magazine is unhampered by local in- 
fluence. It speaks to the nation. No one pretends 
that the magazines named are on sale to any capi- 
talistic influence. If one were "bought," young 
fellows with ideals still burning in them would put 
another in its place. So incalculable has been their 
service in making the millions see the danger-spots 
in the Republic; seeing them so clearly as to bring 
the question of remedies within the region of prac- 
tical politics, that they are already lively competitors 
in point of moral influence with the college and the 
church. Half playfully William James wonders if 
the future historian will not find young men turn- 
ing from the university to the cheap magazine for 
help. This is already true. In every state and 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 327 

city where the fight for clean citizenship is really 
on, the achieving men get instruction and inspira- 
tion from these same sources, just as many an aca- 
demic teacher goes to these same magazines to be 
trained for a part of his own proper work. 

When the Enghsh author above mentioned had 
done his work upon this inclusive journalism, he 
told me, " No nation has a press that should excite 
more pride ^ and encouragement than yours. No- 
where is a part of it worse; nowhere is the other 
part so good. No other people dare to take the lid 
ofif as you do, and that is your safety." 

Like every other issue with which we have dealt, 
the question of press influence is one of comparison 
and of tendency. Is the collective influence of the 
press greater for good in the twentieth century than 
it was in 1800 or in 1825? Any one who cares to 
spend two days upon the dingy files of those older 
organs, will see that they resemble the worst or the 
weakest of our present-day press, but bear little 
resemblance to the best of our press to-day. The 
temper of the time may be shown in a single incident 
in 181 2. It concerns the Federal Republican, 

* Another English editor, Mr. Stead, writes: '^The Century, 
Scribner's, and Harper's are three periodicals the like of which we 
may search for in vain through the periodical literature of the world. 
The American Review of Reviews is much superior in price and 
general get-up and advertisements to the English Review of Re- 
views from which it sprang. We have no magazine comparable 
to the World's Work. Neither have we anything comparable to 
the Youth's Companion, The Ladies' Home Journal, or Success." 



328 AS OTHERS SEE US 

published in Baltimore. For years it used against 
the Government and the democracy a personal 
bitterness so extreme that the building in which 
it was published was destroyed, together with the 
type and presses. Against all warnings, a plucky 
attempt was made by Editor Hanson to continue 
the publication. The author of "Home, Sweet 
Home" gave what proved to be most costly advice. 
A score of brave men promised to defend the new 
building from which the paper was to reappear. 
It was attacked with such fury that the public au- 
thorities were helpless. They got the men into jail 
to protect them, but this was attacked. Half the 
prisoners escaped, but nine were clubbed to death, 
after which their bodies were treated with insane 
brutahty which only Indians on the war-path could 
have matched. 

Our stomach is still strong for literary enormities 
in every variety, but the billingsgate and vitupera- 
tion of a century ago we should not tolerate. It is 
only the "submerged tenth" of our press that equals 
it. It was not alone the famous Editor Duane of 
whom it was written : — 

" Law, order, talents, and civility, 
Before your worshipful mobility, 
Must bow, while you their thinking man, 
Lead by the nose your kindred clan. 
Thou art indeed a rogue as sly 
As ever coined the ready lie 
Amongst the Catilines of faction, 
None calls more energies in action. 



I 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 329 

With impudence the most consummate. 
You publish all that you can come at, 
To make for discord's sake, a handle, 
Of private anecdote, or scandal." 

This editorial shyster is often singled out as an 
exception, but our ablest historian of that quarter 
of a century says he was but one among other "scur- 
rilous libellers." 

So too was 

"William Coleman, who in 1801 became editor of the 
New York Evening Post under the eye of Alexander 
Hamilton ; so was the refined Joseph Dennie, who in the same 
year established at Philadelphia the Portfolio, a weekly paper 
devoted to literature, in which for years to come he was to 
write literary essays, diversified by slander of Jefferson. 
Perhaps none of these habitual libellers deserved censure 
so much as Fisher Ames, the idol of respectability, who 
cheered on his party to vituperate his political opponents. 
He saw no harm in showing 'the knaves,' Jefi'erson and 
Gallatin, the cold-thinking villains who lead, 'whose black 
blood runs intemperately bad,' the motives of their own base 
hearts." ' 

But if democracy's chief educator — the Press — 
has improved; if the totality of press influence is 
now more effective for good ; if the best of it is rous- 
ing the people first to a consciousness, and then to 
a new sensitiveness and shame about our national 
vices, can any comparable word of hope be spoken 
about our Politics ? Very tardily we have learned 
that no answer can be given to this inquiry about 
1 Adams, Vol. I, p. 119. 



330 AS OTHERS SEE US 

politics unless we include in the question the chief 
commercial activities, especially those that have a 
monopoly character. Our more powerful business 
interests give both shape and color to politics. 
Politics does not improve unless business methods 
also improve. Especially in a democracy, the 
morals of business and of politics will rise or fall 
together. If leading business enterprises are as 
lax and reckless as they were after our Civil War, 
nothing could prevent scandals as gross as those 
in Grant's administration. Aaron Burr's sinister 
political influence was neither greater nor less than 
the corrupt business support that was behind him. 
The politics of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island are 
to-day largely what the chief local business methods 
of monopoly character have made them. The task, 
then, is no less formidable than this: to show that 
standards have risen alike in business methods and 
in political activity. The story of New York and 
Chicago street railways, the story of St. Louis, Phil- 
adelphia, and San Francisco are fresh in our minds. 
What at any time could have been worse than these 
tabulated histories? The fleecing of the public in 
these and a score of other industries is on a scale 
so immense that the wiles of the older time seem in 
comparison like the naughtiness of children. Yet 
nothing stands out in our record with greater clear- 
ness than the rise of business and political standards, 
if the temper of the community is taken as a whole. 
The only sure test of a rising standard must be in 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 33 1 

the increased popular sensitiveness to social evils. 
If we are quicker to smart under them, if we are 
more ready and alert to oppose them, the spirit of 
improvement is astir among us. Whenever a com- 
munity becomes conscious and sensitive about an 
evil, progress so far has begun. It may be cruelty 
to children or to animals. To get a new social 
feeling as to what this cruelty means; then to or- 
ganize the feeling into a recognized standard, so 
that the cruelty may be penalized and put under 
ban, is progress. 

This forward social movement may be seen in 
almost every phase of life noted by our critics. 
It is hard now to picture a community in the nine- 
teenth century which tolerated a set of toughs who 
let their nails grow long in order to gouge out other 
men's eyes and to maim each other in ways still 
more hideous. Yet this was an amusement which 
never failed of an audience. As indications of cal- 
lous inhumanity, those brutalities are little if any 
worse than the miscellaneous savagery against those 
who fell into debt, or than the prevailing treatment 
of the insane which few of us can now read without 
a physical shrinking. The prisons where these 
atrocities went on were openly accessible to public 
observation in the very pick of New England com- 
munities. 

Here are examples vouched for by our historian 
McMaster : — 



332 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"The face of the land was dotted with prisons where deeds 
of cruelty were done in comparison with which the foulest acts 
committed in the hulks sink to a contemptible insignificance. 
[For more than fifty years after the peace, there was in Con- 
necticut an underground prison which surpassed in horrors 
the Black Hole of Calcutta. This den, known as the New- 
gate Prison, was in an old worked-out copper mine in the 
hills near Granby. The only entrance to it was by means of 
a ladder down a shaft which led to the caverns underground. 
There, in little pens of wood, from thirty to one hundred cul- 
prits were immured, their feet made fast to iron bars, and their 
necks chained to beams in the roof. The darkness was in- 
tense; the caves reeked with filth; vermin abounded; water 
trickled from the roof and oozed from the sides of the caverns ; 
huge masses of earth were perpetually falling off. In the 
dampness and the filth the clothing of the prisoners grew 
mouldy and rotted away, and their limbs became stiff with 
rheumatism." 

"At Northampton the cells were scarce four feet high, and 
filled with noxious gases of the privy vaults through which 
they were supposed to be ventilated. At the Worcester 
prison were a number of like cells, four feet high by eleven 
long, without a window or a chimney, or even a hole in the 
wall. Not a ray of light ever penetrated them." 

"Modes of punishment long since driven from prisons with 
execrations as worthy of an African kraal were looked upon 
by society with a profound indifference. The treadmill 
was always going. The pillory and the stocks were never 
empty. The shears, the branding irons, and the lash were 
never idle for a day." 

From a report of the committee of the Humane 
Society (New York, 1809) we get a ghmpse of prisons 
that were in still more ghastly condition. In one, 
it was the occupation of a burly negro to strip and 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 333 

flog the inmates. The committee found those in 
chains who had been in these foul quarters so long 
that no one connected with the prison could throw 
the least light on the cause of imprisonment. One 
of these victims was found to be both insane and 
blind. He was in such tatters that the visitors, who 
called special attention to him, are told that it does 
no good to give him clothes because "the rats will 
eat them off him.'" 

That these abominations could exist; that they 
could be so widely known to the public, represents 
an indifference to suffering which we have put a 
good way behind us. 

The atrocities committed against a large part of 
those who could not pay their debts may be seen in 
the fact that the Embargo of 1808 caused a business 
depression so sharp that thousands of hard-working 
and honest people could not meet their liabilities. 
They were not to blame for the panic, but in 1809 
the prisons were choked with men and women who 
owed sums of less than ten dollars. For the very 
poorest of these there was in many instances actually 
no provision made by state or city even to feed them. 
There was no attempt made at ventilation, nor was 
there the slightest sanitary care. There seems never 
to have been room enough, so that damp cellars were 
usually crowded. Sickness and an appalling death- 
rate were, of course, inevitable. 

In the United States of to-day those barbarities 
would excite a riot of moral revolt. We are still 



334 AS OTHERS SEE US 

very dense in dealing with crime, but our advance 
in humaneness and in solicitude for suffering is so 
great that we seem to be in another world. But it 
is very evident that this improved feeling about ojie 
form of evil cannot long be confined to that alone. 
It will slowly assert itself in revolt against other 
forms of evil as their social harmfulness becomes 
clear. 

This is what has happened also in the business 
and political world. We have at last begun to be 
sensitive about innumerable transactions that were 
accepted by our ancestors as they tolerated the 
atrocities of the prisons. When Marryat ^ reports 
the saucy unconcern with which an official tells him 
openly that his salary is so much and his "stealings" 
so much besides, it is not merely a facetious stroke, 
it represents a condition that we have outgrown to 
the extent that public opinion is now stung into 
criticism and into action. 

The head of one of the best-known commission 
houses in New York City has in his library docu- 
ments which record accurately the methods of his 
branch of business for two generations. He tells 
me that no one familiar with business can study 
that record without seeing that the "market tone" 

* "I asked how much his office was worth, and his answer 
was six hundred dollars, besides stealings. This was, at all events, 
frank and honest; in England the word would have been softened 
down to perquisites. I afterwards found that it was a common 
expression in the States to say a place was worth so much besides 
cheatage." Marryat (I), p. 194. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 335 

has risen. It is not merely that a relatively larger 
and larger part of business is done on credit that 
assumes a prevailing trustworthiness in the trade, 
but he adds, "We are compelled to-day to be a great 
deal more solicitous about the entire moral side of 
our dealings." 

As high a type of citizen and business man as 
New England has produced in our time — the late 
John M. Forbes — said openly that in his earlier 
business career "things were done by trustees that 
the public would not for an instant stand to-day, 
and they were done without a thought of their being 
wrong." ^ As one moves from city to city toward 
the West, the same reply is almost invariably given. 
For a good many years I have sought evidence on 
this point. As older inhabitants will illustrate by 
their personal observation, the solid improvement in 
drinking habits; in social refinements; in more 
varied and wholesome pleasures ; in all that touches 
public and private health; they will also tell you 
that the political and business trickeries, common 
in the older time, would to-day excite more instant 
criticism. 

The sickening details of business and political 
corruption that followed our Civil War led the late 
Senator Hoar to examine the old records of our 

^ In speaking of the scandals after our Civil War, the his- 
torian Rhodes describes the popular feeling as severe against the 
bribe-taker but not against the bribe-giver. "In business ethic, 
the man who took a bribe was dishonorable, the man who gave 
it was not." Vol. VII, p. n. 



336 AS OTHERS SEE US 

"idolized days" — the days of Washington, Adams, 
and Jefferson. The honest Massachusetts senator 
had been made half ill by the magnitude of revealed 
corruption during General Grant's administration 
(chiefly the whiskey frauds and those under Secre- 
tary Belknap). It was from this low ebb that he 
made his comparison. His judgment is unequivo- 
cally this, that the politics of those admired days 
were not only more corrupt than to-day, but more 
corrupt as compared to the worst of Grant's regime.^ 

In the chapter on "Our Greatest Critic" it was 
asked if there was anywhere in the pages of Mr. 
Bryce actual evidence for his sustained and buoyant 
spirit of hopefulness about this country. We may 
believe as a matter of faith, never so stoutly, that 
all is to come right, but Mr. Bryce's volumes scarcely 
contain the reasons for his optimism, apart from 
his faith and good-will. After he has disclosed 
some staggering political evil, we are often left spec- 
ulating just why the flame of his good cheer loses 
neither light nor heat. It bums on undiminished, 
and we too feel that he is right. We too cling to 
our faith that all will turn out well with us and our 
institutions ; but are there proofs that our movement 
and direction are right? 

In the open record covered by our list of critics, 
there are substance and material in abundance to 

* The reader who wishes to refresh his mind on the degree of 
corruption that came after our Civil War may iind it in the calm, 
wise pages of Rhodes's " History of the United States," 7th volume. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 337 

answer the question. Bad as we now are and in- 
defensible as our iniquities may be, our ancestors 
acted upon the whole with less political and business 
scruple than we now act. But a word of warning 
is necessary. 

It would be most disreputable work to "show 
up" the infirmities of these ancestors, if it were to 
leave us with added self-complacency. Our sins 
are relatively and for our times as great as theirs, 
and we shall not wash them out except by suffering 
and by struggle. If this is our spirit, we do those 
ancestors no wrong in telling the truth of progress 
and of growth. 

We have to go back hardly more than two genera- 
tions before our first critic, to see many illustrious 
American families accepting undisturbed a goodly 
portion of their income from very murderous piracies 
on the high seas. They took the blood-money with- 
out a shiver. It was the wont and usage of the time. 
There was no conviction of sin about partnership 
in such robberies. This degree of callousness is 
left behind as we approach the nineteenth century. 
But in the year 1800, and long after it, there were 
business and political practices widely current that 
excited far less shame and protest than those prac- 
tices now excite. This new sensitiveness, coupled 
with immense organized energies to curb the evils, 
is itself a definition of Progress. But are we mak- 
ing headway? 

Let us look at the one state where we can best 



338 AS OTHERS SEE US 

see the interaction between politics and privileged 
business early in the last century, the state of New- 
York. The work of transcribing events authenti- 
cally from the journals of the Senate has been so far 
done, that we know accurately what happened. It 
was long thought that New York was the one un- 
happy exception. We now know that it stood fairly 
for methods that were very general throughout the 
country. In 1816 the aldermen were stealing the 
city land by tricks inconceivable in that city to-day. 
The great number of state licensed lotteries were 
not alone a source of debauchery in themselves, they 
had a political use which was even worse. The 
history of favors secured by the Exchange Bank in 
181 8 was rank with venality. To buy legislative 
aid with bank or insurance company stock was a 
system. The frauds of the insurance companies 
were far more openly gross than any we have known 
in our day. From 1805 the relation of chartered 
business to political scandals continued with regu- 
larity and notoriety. In 181 2 the Assembly com- 
pelled its members to pledge themselves not to sell 
their votes, though this pledge was of short duration. 
The story of the Brooklyn Ferry Monopoly, of the 
Commercial Bank, of the Chemical Bank, of the 
capitalization of the State Bank, and of the Man- 
hattan Bank which the politicians controlled, are 
one and all of the same character.* When the con- 

' Let the reader turn to McMaster (Vol. VI, p. 405) and note 
what banking methods were in use twenty-five years later. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 339 

test for full manhood suffrage came in 1820, the 
richer class was shocked because " corruption would 
come in with the people." It is true the people 
were used to this end, but the essential evil in its 
worse form was all there, and never more gluttonously 
used than when the suffrage was confined to "the 
safe property interests," to the genteel and the well- 
nurtured. Why, then, should the blame have been 
heaped alone upon the poor political goat, as if he 
alone were the sinner? Why should the business 
partner get off so easily ? Not until within ten years 
has this union between business and politics had a 
popular and convincing explanation. We see at last 
that if a great mining area like Montana develops 
a fierce competitive and gambling spirit, the state 
politics will merely reflect that spirit, and the richest 
man who wants it will buy his place in the Senate. 
If the chief industry is lumbering, and the competi- 
tive passion connives at the organized robbery of 
public forests, the same type of man takes his seat 
in that body. The cry was always heard, " Politics 
must be reformed!" The cry should have been, 
Those business methods which create politics must 
be reformed 1 To have made this discovery ; to 
see what it means with the railroads, forests, grazing 
lands, mines, and all forms of chartered privilege, is 
more important than any mechanical discovery of 
our age. To go straight on in the way we have at 
last set out, to bring this whole group of privileges 
under social control; to stop once for all private 



340 AS OTHERS SEE US 

persons from using these immense values as mere 
dice in their game; to stop the interception of un- 
earned wealth that has made our craziest inequalities, 
is the kind of progress that puts justice and fair 
dealing into our business and therefore into our 
politics.^ The whole renaissance of ardor and 
interest in civic decency that is now alive in the 
nation ; that pulses in the best of our press ; that 
gives us a score of books each year and has created 
hundreds of active organizations in the country, 
is largely due to the new confidence that we see 
what the evil is and how to measure our strength 
against it. 

Again and again, our best critics have noted a 
sinister "fatalism" in our attitude toward these 
evils. "You cannot get your American to kick 
unless he is threatened by some dramatic disaster " 
is said of us for a hundred years. The kicking has 
set in, and the altered experience through which the 
talent has developed is full of hope. Nearly three 
generations ago Abdy was in despair about slavery 
because "the people I meet will not admit it to be 
evil." The second phase of this despair was that 
"even if it is an evil, nothing can be done about it." 
We have passed through both those phases as they 
concern a great many social perils. 

* We shall sometime wake out of our drugged condition to see 
that the excesses of our tariff (as in Pennsylvania) have sunk 
the political tone and method to depths from which it will require 
the moral valor of a generation to lift and free us. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 34I 

In 1830 a writer records this about tuberculosis: 
"What they call 'consumption' kills the Americans 
as if they were perpetually in battle ; but they speak 
of it as if it were in no way their concern, rather as 
if God sent it for some reason of His own." We 
are now assured that "simply to use the knowledge" 
at our disposal is to check tuberculosis as effectively 
as has been done in the case of smallpox. 

But this new consciousness of power over evils 
that had been accepted as fatal is no longer confined 
to diseases of the body. We are learning that politi- 
cal and industrial diseases are no more a necessity 
than yellow fever. A new shame has come to Ameri- 
cans throughout the land because they were so long 
and so cheaply fooled by common rogues in the shape 
of party bosses created and backed by privileged 
interests. East and West so many of these creatures 
have been put to rout and the tawdry tricks exposed, 
that the question rises why we were so long lulled 
into this fool's submission. It was largely because 
we did not see straight. It was largely because the 
deeper causes of bad politics were hidden from us. 
To leave privileged monopoly in private hands, with 
only a pretence of regulation, is an open and direct 
premium upon organized bribe-giving and bribe- 
taking. Every special vice was protected and en- 
couraged by the methods of secrecy which these 
favored monopolies were permitted to use. The 
public gave outright every chartered condition on 
which monopoly rests. These indispensable grants 



342 AS OTHERS SEE US 

gave rights to state and city which we forgot, 
until the abuses became so topping and outrageous 
that the close of the nineteenth century saw the be- 
ginning of a revolt which another generation will 
count quite as revolutionary as the uprising against 
slavery after 1830. If less desperate, the struggle 
before us will be as long as that against the other 
slavery. It will weigh men in the balance, even as 
it did then. It will call forth noble heroism and, 
alas ! also the cringing cowardice which selfish 
idolatries always engender. None of us will escape 
the test. The Church, the College, the Press, will 
no more avoid it than the politician or the man in 
the street. 

It is progress to be awakened to the facts. To 
have begun the struggle is further progress. The 
one hope of it all is to realize that the main work 
has yet to be done. It lies there before us solely 
as opportunity — opportunity for large and disin- 
terested citizenship. 

Not a tittle more democracy can be ours than that 
which is measured by our freedom from the worst 
of our business monopolies which we created by our 
common negligence and our common ignorance, and 
have so long permitted as to leave very few of us 
without consenting guilt. As the mass and extent 
of this lawlessness has been laid bare, so that the 
people could see how deep and dangerous a pit we 
have been digging for popular government, the 
revolt has come. It has for the first time in our 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 



343 



history shown vigor enough to frighten the law- 
breakers. They are now crying for relief. In the 
words of another classic law-breaker, — 

"I'm a quiet Old Cove," says he with a groan: 
"All I axes is — Let me alone." 

But why " let alone" ? " Because," says the Cove, 
"money incomes will be endangered. We have 
been corrupting and breaking the laws of the people. 
That is true of us ; but to make us obey those laws 
will injure business and it will, moreover, hurt a 
great many innocent people." 

This in its nakedness is the answer. The shabby 
excuse appears unashamed in scores of our papers. 
Yet, there is nothing less than the Nation's honor and 
health at stake. Will the people continue to toler- 
ate the corruption and the lawlessness for the sake 
of these stock-exchange estimates? For the entire 
people and for a larger future even this cash-box 
reckoning is false. It is true, if at all, only for the 
few and for the immediate present. Political and 
business honesty must surely be best in the long run 
for the great body of our people. We shall go on 
struggling and caring for the money income, but we 
must learn also to care greatly and with some passion 
for business straightness and political cleanness. 
This nobler solicitude will prove the one unavoid- 
able test of our democracy. We have begun now 
to compel our money kings to play a fair game and 
obey the law. This is well and necessary, because 



344 AS OTHERS SEE US 

many of them have so conspicuously disobeyed. 
They have caused more havoc than lesser folk. 
They have rifled the people's wealth. But most of 
them have also organized, built up, and immensely 
developed our national resources. This shall go 
down to their credit. There is no unpleasanter 
fact about "us common people" than the desire, 
old as it is new, to have a scapegoat upon which 
to pack our own sins. We are now forcing "the 
rich" into this service. They must be made to 
act legally; but so must all of us be made to act 
legally. 

To get this sense of law-abidingness into our minds 
as a people is the duty above all others now before 
us. To look the dishonors straight in the face ; to 
flay bribe-sanctioning at the top, as we flay bribe- 
taking at the bottom; to see that the corrupting of 
a legislature is a darker and a meaner sin than the 
slugging of a scab; to ask for "law and order" 
among the mighty as we ask it among the obscure; 
to set ourselves grimly and a little sadly — as if 
with a sense of common frailty — to the great task 
of national house cleaning, is the solemn beginning 
to which we are committed in these early days of 
the twentieth century. 

It will not pass as a spasm of moral irritation 
because a deep and sustaining popular sentiment 
has at last been aroused and instructed. Men with 
stout hearts willing to fight on the outer lines may 
now count on this support. It is a sentiment that 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS 345 

cannot lessen because the causes out of which it 
sprang are multiplying in the community. Where 
the people have suffered most, there the flame of 
the new feeling is at its height. From Oregon to 
Los Angeles the uprising is most clearly felt. 

It was on that fateful Pacific coast that the people 
came first to see the farce of " representative 
government." Monopoly-made politics had there a 
stalking effrontery which was all the swifter to carry 
its convincing lessons to the people. 

The ringing cry for direct primary, referendum, 
initiative, recall, and popular election of senators 
which fills that freer air is the challenge to monopoly 
privilege. It is the cry for that measure of economic 
and political equality which has long been our 
theory, but never our practice. It is the cry that 
democratic government shall now begin in the United 
States. 

This hardier spirit is everywhere alive in the great 
West. It is alive in the East, but the sanctities of 
precedent and privilege lie heavier upon the older 
section. Yet the new moral reckoning is of no 
section ; neither is it of any party, sect, or nationality. 

In the long list of the century's critics there is 
scarcely a volume which does not directly or indi- 
rectly, willingly or unwillingly, bear witness to this 
slow rise in social sensitiveness, and in social pur- 
pose to free ourselves from industrial and political 
tyrannies. Twenty years ago, one of these censors 
used words with which I gladly close this study. 



346 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Though they apply quite as fitly to other nations, 
we can well afford to take the hint they offer. 

"If the American should once become possessed 
of a little genuine humility, a humility without loss 
of courage or self-respect; if he lost a little hard- 
ness in his self-confidence and became more teach- 
able, his mastery in the art of self-government would 
easily lead the world." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Abdy, E. S. Journal in the United States, 3 vols. London. 

1835. 

Arfwedson, C. D., Esq. The United States and Canada in 
1832-3-4, 2 vols. London. 1834. 

Arnold, Matthew. Civilization in the United States. Bos- 
ton. 1888. 

Archer, William. America To-day. New York, Scribners. 
1899. 

Ashe, Thomas. Travels in America. London. 1808. 

Bradbury, John. Travels in 1809-10-11. Liverpool. 1817. 

Bremer, Frederika. The Homes of the New World. New 
York. 1853. 

Brothers, Thomas. The United States (A Cure for Radical- 
ism). London. 1840. 

Brown, William. America. Leeds, England. 1849. 

Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. 
Macmillan. 1888. (Later Edition.) 

Buckingham, J. S. America (Eastern and Western States), 
3 vols. London. 1842. 

Bume-Jones, Sir Philip. Dollars and Democracy. Apple- 
ton. New York. 1904. 

Butler, Mrs. Journal, 2 vols. Philadelphia. 1835. Plan- 
tation Journal. 1838-9. Harper. New York. 1836. 

Cobbett, Wm. A Year's Residence in the United States, 
3 Parts. New York. 181 9. 

Collyer, R. H., M.D. Lights and Shadows of American Life. 
1836. 

Combe, George. Notes on the United States, 2 vols. 
Philadelphia. 1841. 

349 



350 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Cooper, J. F. Notions of the Americans, 2 vols. Philadel- 
phia. 1832. 

Dickens, Charles. American Notes. 

Duhring, Henry. Remarks on the United States of America. 
London. 1833. 
. Duncan, John M., A.B. Travels in 1818-19, 2 vols. 
Glasgow. 1823. 

Faithful, Emily. Three Visits to the United States. Edin- 
burgh. 1884. 

Faux, W. Memorable Days in America. London. 1823. 

Fearon, H. B. Sketches of America. London. 1818. 

Fiddler, Rev. Isaac. Observations, etc. New York. 1833. 

Freeman, E. A. Some Impressions of the United States. 
London. 1883. 

Godley, J. R. Letters from America, 2 vols. London. 
1844. 

Griffin, Sir Lepel. The Great Republic. London. 1884. 

Grund, F. J. The Americans. Boston. 1837. 

Hall, Capt. Basil. Travels in North America in 1827-8, 
2 vols. Edinburgh. 1829. 

Hamilton, Thomas. Men and Manners in America, 2 vols. 
Philadelphia. 1833. 

Hodgson, Adam. Letters from North America, 2 vols. 
London. 1824. 

Hole, Dean. A Little Tour in America. London. 1895. 

Kjpling, Rudyard. American Notes. Boston. 1899. 

Lyell, Sir Charles. Travels, 2 vols. London. 1845. Second 
Visit, 2 vols. London. 1849. 

Mackay, Alex. The Western World, 2 vols. Philadelphia. 
1849. 

Marryat, Capt. Diary in America; also Part Second, 3 vols. 
London. 1839. 

• Martineau, Harriet. Society in America, 3 vols. London. 

1837- 

• Muirhead, J. F. The Land of Contrasts. Boston. 1898. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 351 

Murray, Hon. C. A. Travels in North America. New York. 
1839. 

Playfair Papers, 3 vols. London. 1841. 

Power, Tyrone. Impressions of America, 2 vols. Philadel- 
phia. 1836. 

Priest, William. Travels, etc. London. 1802. 

Shirreflf, Patrick, Farmer. A Tour Through North America. 
Edinburgh. 1835. 

Stead, W. T. The Americanization of the World. New York. 
1902. 

Sterling, James. Letters from the Slave States. London. 

1857- 

Steevens, G. W. The Land of the Dollar. New York. 
1897. 

Stuart, James. Three Years in North America, 2 vols. 
Edinburgh. 1833. 

SutcliflF, Robert. Travels. York (Eng.). 1815. 

Trollope, Anthony. North America. New York. 1862. 

Trollope, Mrs. Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols. 
London. 1832. 

(See criticisms of this author in American Quarterly, Sep- 
tember, 1832, and in North American Review, January, 

1833-) 
Vigne, G. T. Six Months in America. Philadelphia. 1833. 
Weld, Isaac. Travels, etc., 2 vols. London. 1807. 
Wells, H. G. The Future in America. Harpers. 1906. 
Wortley, Lady. Travels in the United States. New York. 

1851. 

French Criticisms 

Adam, Paul. Vues d'Am^rique. Paris. 1906. 
Ampere, J. J. Promenade in Amdrique. Paris. 1855. 
D'Almbert, Alfred. Flanerie Parisienne aux Etats Unis. 
Paris. 1856. 



352 AS OTHERS SEE US 

Bourget, Paul. Outre-Mer, 2 vols. Paris. 1895 (translated), 
Brissot, J. P. Nouveau Voyage dans les Etats Unis, 3 vols. 

Paris. 1 791. 
Chauteaubriand. Travels in America and Italy, 2 vols. 

London. 1828. 
Chevalier, Michael. Society, Manners, and Politics in the 

United States. Boston. 1837. 
Crevecoeur, St. John. Voyage, etc., 3 vols. Paris. 1801. 
De Bacourt. Souvenirs d'un Diplomate. Paris. 1882. 
Dugard, Marie. La Societe Americaine. Paris. 1896. 
Gobat. Croquis et Impressions d'Amerique. 
Gohier, Urbain. Le Peuple du XX Siecle. Paris. 1896. 
Huret, Jules. En Amerique. Paris. 1904. 

De New York a la Nouvelle Orleans. 1905. 

Klein, Abbe. Au Pays de la Vie Intense (translated). Paris. 

1905. 
Laboulaye, M. Paris en Amerique. Paris. 1870. 
La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Voyage dans Les Etats Unis. 

Paris. 1795-6-7. 
Le Roux, H. Business and Love. Dodd Mead, New York- 

1903. 
Lowenstem, Isidore. Le Estats Unis et la Havane. Paris. 

1842. 
Moreau, G. L'Envers des Etats Unis. Paris. 1903. 
Murat, le Prince. Letters sur Les Etats Unis. Paris. 

1830. (Translation, New York, 1849.) 
Nevers, Edmond de. L'Ame Americaine. Paris. 1900. 
O'Rell, Max. Jonathan and his Continent. New York. 

Cassell. 1889. 
Regnier. Au Pays de I'Avenir. 1906. 
Rousier, Paul de. La Vie Americaine, 2 vols. Paris. 1899 

(translated). 
Soissons, de S. C. A Parisian in America. Boston. 1896. 
De Tocqueville. Democracy in America, 2 vols. (Bowen's 

translation.) Cambridge, Mass. 1862. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



353 



Varigny, G. de. Six Months in America. 1833. 
Wagner, Charles. My Impressions of America. McClure, 
Phillips & Co. New York. 1905. 

German CRinciSMS 

Altherr. Eine Amerikafahrt in Zwanzig Briefen. 1905. 

Baumgartner, Professor A. Erinnerungen aus America. 
Zurich. 1906. 

Boecklin, August. Wanderleben. Leipzig. 1902. 

Bodenstadt, F. Vom Atlantischen zum Stillen Ocean. Leip- 
zig. 1882. 

Fulda, Ludwig. Amerikanische Eindriicke. Cotta. 1906. 

Herter, A. Die Wahrheit iiber Amerika. Bern. 1886. 

Hintrager, Dr. Wie lebt und arbeitet Man in den Vereinigten 
Staaten. Brentano. 1904. 

Julius, Dr. N. H. Nordamerikas sittliche Zustande. Leipzig. 
1839. 

Knortz, Karl. Aus der Transatlantischen Gesellschaft. Leip- 
zig. 1887. 

Lamprecht, Professor Karl. Americana. Freiburg. 1906. 

Munsterberg, Professor Hugo. American Traits. Hough- 
ton Mifflin. 1903. 

Munsterberg, Professor Hugo. The Americans. McClure & 
Phillips. 1904. 

Neve, I. L. Charakterziige des Amerikanischen Volkes. 
Leipzig. 1903. 

Ratzel, F. Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, 2 vols. 
1878. 

Sievers, Wilhelm. Amerika. Leipzig. 1894. 

Von Polenz, W. Das Land der Zukunft. Brentano. New 
York. 

Von Raumer, Baron. America and the American People. 
New York. 1846. (Professor of History, Berlin.) 

Zimmermann, Karl. Onkel Sam. Stuttgart. 1904. 

2 A 



INDEX 



Abdy, E. S., quoted on American 
bragging, 66-67; references to, 

299. 340- 
Abolitionists, Harriet Martineau 

and the, 108-109. 
Accent, the American, 47-48, 77. 

See Voice. 
Accidents in early and present-day 

travelling, 303-304. 
Ache, Caran d', 227 n. 
Adam, Paul, 80, 129, 187-188; ad- 
miration for American art, 187- 

188. 
Adams, Andy, " Log of a Cowboy " 

by, 16. 
Adams, Henry, " History of United 

States " by, quoted, 308-309, 329. 
Adaptability, quality of, 42, 84, 87. 
Advertisements, charlatans', 86. 
Alertness of children, 49. 
Almbert, Alfred d', quoted, 63 n., 

187 n. 
"American Commonwealth," James 

Bryce's, analysis of, 231-252. 
" American Many, The," Mill's 

term, 167. 
" American Traits," Miinsterberg's, 

253 ff- 
Americans, good and bad, 55-59. 
" Americans, The," Miinsterberg's 

work, 255-256. 
Ames, Fisher, 33, 329. 
Ampdre, J. J., 50; on American 

self-complacency, 66. 
Ancestry craze, 262-263. 
" Aperju," Poletika's, 308. 
Archer, William, 128, 221; quoted, 

4. 143- 
Arfwedson, C. D., quoted, 302-303. 



Arnold, Matthew, 13; on George 
Washington, 39-40; criticisms 
by, 113-114; quoted, 117, 290 n.; 
value to Americans of work by, 
208 ; on manners of English and 
of American women, 209 ; cited, 

325- 
Art, French praise of American, 

187-188 ; progress in, 312. 
Ashe, Thomas, 35, 123. 
Associational activity in America, 

79- 
Astronomical work, American, 312. 
Aveling, Dr., in America, 274. 

Bacon, Mrs., quoted, 95, 
Bacourt, De, 26, 248. 
Bad manners, 77. See Manners. 
Bad roads, 21, 22, 31, 300-303. 
Bagehot, Walter, quoted, 131, 
Balance, lack of, 186-187. 
Baldwin, W. J., quoted, 192. 
Ball, Sir Robert, cited, 312. 
Baltimore, foreign paupers in, 

105. 
Balzac, French love of money set 

forth by, 144-145. 
Bancroft, George, bragging by, 64. 
Bernhardt, Sara, rhapsodies by, 

I7S n. 
Biddle, Nicholas, loi. 
Billings, Josh, extracts from, 225- 

226. 
Blackwood's Magazine, articles in, 

on America, 118, 122; Michael 

Scott's remarks in, 149. 
Blanc, Madame, 129, 180. 
Blouet, Paul, 23 n. ; quoted, 175, 

178, 197. 
55 



356 



INDEX 



Boarding-houses, 21. 

Book-pirating, 35, 120. 

Bootjack story, 221. 

Boss, the political, 259, 269-273, 
285-286, 341-342. 

Boston, people of, 40-41 ; Harriet 
Martineau in, 81, 108-110; Bris- 
sot de Warville in, 174; Jack 
London and H. G. Wells in, 
276. 

Bostonians, pitiless hospitality of, 83. 

Boston Transcript genealogical 
page, 263. 

Bourget, Paul, 103, 129, 185. 

Bradbury, John, 123, 193. 

Bragging, American, 21, 60-76, 77 ; 
different ways of, 61-62 ; special 
American brand of, 63-64; rea- 
sons for trait, 70-71, 73-74 ; West- 
em t/^. Eastern, 71-73; contrast 
afforded by Japanese modesty, 
74-75 ; abatement of, 75-76. 

Breakfast punctuality, 182-183. 

Bremer, Frederika, 26 ; quoted, 83, 
99-100. 

Bright, John, quoted, 92-93. 

Brissot, J. P., 14. 

British Review, articles in, 118. 

Brooks, Phillips, 231. 

Brothers, Thomas, quoted, 28-29, 
122. 

Brown, William, 27 n. ; quoted, 43. 

Bryce, James, 13, 128, 313 ; a trib- 
ute to, 18 ; quoted, 40, 62 n., 82, 
loi, 130, 172, 238 ff., 315, 316, 
318 ; on American bragging, 68, 
76; on diminution of oversensi- 
tiveness, 114-115; on million- 
naires in America and in Eng- 
land, 146 ; on effect of equality 
on manners, 205-206; judgment 
of, on American humor, 229-230 ; 
cosmopolitan good-fellowship of, 
232-234; value of work by, to 
Europeans, 237-238; to Ameri- 
cans, 238 ; optimism of, 241, 336 ; 
on the House of Representatives, 
2830. 



Buckingham, J. S., 28. 
Buckminster, quoted, loi. 
Buffalo, Frederika Bremer in, 

99-100. 
Bunn, Alfred, quoted, 102. 
Busch, Wilhelm, 227 n. 
Business standards, improvement 

in, 330. 334-346. 

Cable, George W., 16. 
Caesarism in America, 318. 
Caird, Sir James, story of, 201. 
Calamities, certain ever impending, 

315-321- 
Callender, attacks on Jefferson by, 

32-33- 

Capitol at Washington, 21. 

Carlier, Auguste, 180. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 23. 

Carnegie, Andrew, description of, 
by H. G. Wells, 291. 

Catholics, ill-treatment of, 108; pre- 
dicted dangers from, 317-318. 

Century Magazine , 327 n. 

Change, love of, 84, 87, 90. 

" Chanting Cherubs," draping of, ii. 

Chapman, Mrs., Memoirs of, 109. 

Charlatans, America the home of, 

85. 89. 

Chastellux, Marquis of, quoted, 25, 
307-308. 

Chateaubriand, 37. 

Chevalier, Michael, 38, 79 n., 153, 
176, 232, 304 ; quoted, 63, 79, 92, 
118 n. ; on avarice among the 
French, 145. 

Chicago, 23, 71 n., 73, 179, 

Child labor, 277, 313. 

Children, manners of, 48-49 ; hap- 
piness and alertness of, 49-50; 
German and American con- 
trasted, 266-267; effect of Amer- 
ican city life on immigrants', 
280. 

Chinese, wages earned by, 305. 

Christian Science story, 222 n. 

Church, commercialism in the, 286- 
287. 



INDEX 



357 



Church and State, American sepa- 
ration of, 8, 317. 

Churches, niggardly use of Protes- 
tant, 188 n. 

Civil War, 92-93, 169 ; lessons 
taught by, 111-112; English re- 
spect won by, 130-132 ; a German 
writer's remarks, 133. 

Classical allusions by speakers and 
writers on American democracy, 

153- 

Cobden, Richard, 15, 38; quoted, 
6g, 148. 

Coldness of Americans, 90. 

Coleman, William, 329. 

Coleridge, S. T., quoted, 19 n. 

Colleges, English bishop's visits to 
American, 73. 

Cologne Gazette correspondent, 45. 

Comic papers, 215-217, 227-228. 

Commercialism in American life, 
286-288. 

Conceit, 60-76. 

Conductors of trains, 201-202. 

Congress, American, 2 ; servile 
position of members of, 269-273. 

" Coniston," remarks caused by, 
264. 

Corn-eating methods, 78. 

Corruption, in public service cor- 
porations, 244-246 ; not due to 
democratic form of government, 
250; political, 269-273, 285-286; 
early and present-day political, 
335-336; in New York State, 
338. 

Craddock, Charles Egbert, 16. 

Crapsey, Dr. A. S., quoted, 79 n. 

CrSvecoeur, St. John, 14. 

Crothers, Dr. Samuel M., 220. 

Curiosity, American, 84, 88, 232- 
233. 

Daudet, Alphonse, on Mark Twain, 

226. 
De Amicis, Edmondo, 19; quoted, 

62 n., 75 n. ; cited, 90, 139 n. 
Debt, payment of national, 131. 



Debts, State repudiation of, 119, 
249. 

Declaration of dependence, 267, 

Deland, Margaret, 16. 

" Democracy in America," De 
Tocqueville's, 107, 151 if. 

Dentists, 78. 

Depew, Senator, 270. 

Derby, Lord, quoted by Mr. Stead, 
147. 

Descent, pride of, 8o-8i. 

Dicey, Professor, suggestion by, 
147-148. 

Dickens, Charles, truth of criticisms 
by, 12-13 ; references to, 28, 90, 
104, 202-203, 299, 311; quoted, 
30, 60-61, 122, 139, 214-215. 

Dilettantism, democratic, 264-266. 

Drinking, by women, 36-37. 

Drinking habits, 319. 

Drugs, use of, 86. 

Duane, editor, 328. 

Dunker, Dr., quoted, 265-266. 

Dwight, Timothy, on Jefferson's 
government, 33; on Bostonians, 
40; answers British attacks, 120. 

Edinburgh Quarterly Review arti- 
cles, 118-121. 

Education, of American girls, 184 ; 
too positive methods in, criti- 
cised, 185-186; of colored race, 
190; Mr. Bryce's hopes based 
on, 251-252; public and private 
schools, 261-262. 

Edwards, Miss Betham-, quoted, 
139 n. 

Elbows on table, 78. 

Emerson, R. W., 70, 72; quoted, 
130 n., 203, 211. 

England, visitors to America from, 
38 ; grounds of American sensi- 
tiveness to opinion in, 103 ff. ; 
criticisms by writers of, 1 16 ff. ; 
effect of Civil War on opinion 
in, 130-132 ; love of money in, 
145 ; power of wealth in, 146 ; 
suggested Fourth of July celebra- 



358 



INDEX 



tions in, 148-149; contrast be- 
tween past and present feeling 
in, towards America, 149-150; 
graft in, 289 ; upper and middle 
classes in, 289-290 ; Wells's com- 
parison of America and, 290. 

English grammar, story of the, 106. 

Equality, theory of social, 261-263. 

Everett, Edward, speech by, 67. 

Exaggeration, passion for, 83, 186- 
187 ; as a point of humor, 221- 
222. 

Faithful, Emily, on American girls, 
51 ; Mrs. Skinner's speech 
quoted by, 54-55. 

Farmers, prosperity of, 276. 

Fatalists, Americans as, 84, 87, 

340- 

Federal Republican incident, 327- 
328. 

Fees. See Tipping. 

Figaro, conditions necessary to 
appreciate, 217. 

Fiske, John, 17, 24. 

Flatteries, certain French, 173-175. 

Fliegende Blaetter, humor of, 227. 

Flogging in army and navy, ab- 
sence of, 6. 

Forbes, John M., 335. 

Foreigners citizens of America, 44. 

Foreign policy, American, 316. 

Foreign Quarterly, on Americans, 
121-122. 

Forestry policy of United States, 
57, 162-165. 

Foster, Ambassador, quoted, 149. 

Fourth of July celebrations, sug- 
gested English, 148-149. 

Fox, John, Jr., 16. 

France, Americanizing of, 23 n. ; 
visitors from, 37-38, 173-190. 

Franchises, granting of, 164. 

Franklin, Benjamin, Quarterly Re- 
view article on, 121. 

Frechheit, 43-44. 

Freedom, limits of American, 267- 
273. 



Freeman, Edward, 39; on the 
American voice, 142 ; on Eng- 
lish pride in America, 150; on 
American manners, 211-212; on 
democratic form of government 
and corruption, 250 n. 

French, bragging among the, 62- 
63 ; on American bragging, 65- 
66 ; talking at meals by, 140 ; 
love of money among, 144-145. 

Froude, J. Anthony, quoted, 212 n. 

" Future in America," Wells's, 
277 if. 

Gallatin, Albert, 55-56, 329. 

Gambling, 286. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 108-109. 

Gasparin, A. E. de, 37. 

Genealogical craze, 262-263. 

Genty, M., 24. 

Germans, Americans' ideas about, 
and vice versa, 253 fF. 

Germany, visitors to America from, 
38 ; Miinsterberg's book written 
for, 253 ff. ; children of, con- 
trasted with American children, 
266-267. 

Gifford, William, 118. 

Girls, American, 50-51 ; marriage 
of, 184; French and American 
educational ideals for, 184-185 ; 
Miinsterberg's eulogy of, 258. 

Gladstone, W. E., a tribute to 
America from, 131. 

Glasgow, Ellen, 17. 

Godkin, E. L., cited, 298. 

Godley, J. R., on Bostonians, 40. 

Goethe on good manners, 205. 

Gold-filled teeth, 78. 

Gold standard, 57. 

Graft, 287; in England and in 
America, 289. 

Grant, President, corruption dur- 
ing administration of, 336. 

Grillenberger, 38, 129. 

Grose, B., quoted, 44 n. 

Grund, Francis J., quoted, 321. 

Gum chewing, 257. 



INDEX 



359 



Habeas animum, 271-273. 

Hadley, A. T., on value of good 
manners, 192. 

Hall, Captain Basil, i ff., 102, 104 ; 
work by, 1-2 ; quoted, 2-3, 3-4, 
6, 7, 8, 9, 10; on Americans' in- 
ability to take a joke, 213. 

Hamerton, P. G., 19; quoted, 
197 n., 207. 

Hamilton, Thomas, quoted, 27-28 ; 
mentioned, 102, 104. 

Harper's Magazine, 327 n. 

Hay, John, 316. 

Health and ill-health of Americans, 
307-308. 

Heelers, political, 285-286. 

Helps, Sir Arthur, quoted, 84 n. 

Higginson, Mrs., i. 

Hillebrand, Karl, 19. 

Hoar, Senator, 335-336. 

Hoboken, Prince Talleyrand at, 

23- 

Hod-carriers, wages of, 306. 

Hole, Dean, on American inter- 
viewers, 143. 

Hoist, Professor von, cited, 325. 

Hopefulness, quality of, 241-242. 

Horwill, H. W., 46 n. 

Hospitality, American pitiless, 83. 

Hot bread, 21. 

Hotel clerks, 22, 211-212. 

Hotels, 21, 212,302 ; over-ornament- 
ing of, 186. 

House of Commons, Congress con- 
trasted with, 2-3. 

Houses, matter of wooden, 90-91. 

" How do you like us ? " trait, 99- 
103. 

Howells, W. D., 102. 

Hugo, Victor, 61, 63. 

Humbuggery, 85, 89. 

Humility, necessity of, for Ameri- 
cans, 346. 

Humor, American, 85, 213 ff. ; 
specimens of, 218-227 '< verdict 
on, of various authorities, 227- 
230. 

Huret, Jules, 185. 



Hurry, habit of, 46-47, 137-138. 
" Hurryupitis," 138 n. 

Ice cream, large helps to, 21, 22. 
Ice-water drinking, 21, 22, 135-136. 
Immigration, scope of opportunity 

in America a chief incentive to, 

314- 
Immigration problem, 113, 278- 

280. 
Improvement. See Progress. 
India and United States contrasted, 

295- 

Indians, Americans' treatment of, 
108. 

Inheritance laws, American inno- 
vations in, 6-7, 124, 317. 

Intemperance, among American 
women, 36-37; spectre of the 
increase in, 319. 

Interviewers, opinions on, 143. 

Irishmen, effect of America on, 

314- 
Irving, Washington, quoted, 123; 

on American scenery, 135. 
Italians, murdered at New Orleans, 

112, 125 ; wages earned by, 304. 

Jackson, Andrew, and an ill-bred 

American, 198-199. 
James, William, 177-178, 188, 326. 
Jamestown Exposition document, 

72-73- 
Janet, Claudio, 38, 180; quoted, 

140. 
Janson, C. W., 14-15, 26-27. 
Japanese, modesty of, 74-75 ; in 

California schools, 113, 125-126. 
Jealousies, sectional, 320-321. 
Jefferson, Thomas, attacks on, 32- 

33. 329- 
Jerrold, Douglas, 220, 300. 
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 16. 
Jews in America, 41-44. 
Johnson, Andrew, impeachment 

of, 131. 
Johnson, Dr., on Americans, 19 n. 
Jokes, 213-230. 



360 



INDEX 



Joking habit, 139. 

Journalists, De Tocqueville's opin- 
ion of, 167 ; visits of French, to 
America, 178-179. 

Jowett, Benjamin, quoted, 97. 

Judge, French verdict on, 215. 

Kemble, Fanny, 38, 50, 53. 
Kickers, English and American, 

92-97. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 35, 38, 71 n.; on 

pirating of books, 120. 
Klein, Abb6, 38, 96, 128, 319; work 

by, 188. 

Laboulaye, Edouard R. L. de, 80. 

Ladies' Home Journal, 325, 327 n. 

La Farge, John, 188. 

Lafayette, Marquis de, 37. 

Lamb, Charles, rank of, as a wit, 
220, 221. 

Lamprecht, Karl, quoted, 71 n. 

La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Due 
de, 37, 174-175. 

Lausan, Due de, 37. 

Laws, prolific passing of, 83. 

Leclaire, Max, work by, 179 n. 

Le Play, 180, 181. 

Liberty, misconceptions about 
American, 267-273. 

Liebknecht, in America, 274-275. 

Life, German criticism of, 216; 
compared with Fliegende Blaet- 
ter, 227. 

Littlefield, Congressman, quoted, 
239-240. 

London, Jack, 276. 

Lowell cotton mills, 15, 304. 

Lowell, J. R., epithets applied to, 
59; quoted, 72, 93. 

Lyell, Sir Charles, on American 
bragging, 70; comments caused 
by eye-glass of, 203; on advan- 
tages of equality, 206 n.; quality 
of good-will in, 232; on dangers 
of travel in America, 303. 

Lynching, Bourget's description 
of, 179 n. 



Machine rule in politics, 269-272. 

Mclver, Dr., on travelling sales- 
men, 224-225. 

Mackay, Alexander, quoted, 62, 
200, 308. 

McMaster, J. B., cited, 12, 338; 
quoted, 306, 332. 

Magazines, 325-329. 

Maine, a bad feature of prohibi- 
tion in, 98. 

Manners, De Tocqueville on 
American, 175; as a business 
asset, 191-192; of Americans 
travelling abroad, 195-197 ; ne- 
cessity for establishing a stand- 
ard of, 203-204; effect of spirit 
of equality on, 205-206. 

Mark Twain, Daudet's lack of 
appreciation of, 226. 

Marryat, Captain, quoted, 28, 72, 
249. 334; on military titles in 
America, 82 ; on Miss Martineau 
in Boston, no; on American 
accent, 141 n.; good-fellowship 
of, 200; on American humor, 
216; cited, 321. 

Marrying titles, 184, 

Martineau, Harriet, 13-14, 15, 28, 
38 ; on aspersions of Americans 
by one another, 34-35; on 
American children, 49-50; on 
American snobbishness, 81 ; and 
Boston anti-abolitionists, 108- 
109; tribute to works of, no; on 
money and American regard for, 
144; on American manners, 211; 
on American drollery, 216; on 
steamboat travelling, 303; on 
health and speaking voice of 
women, 310. 

Mexico, customs and manners in, 
192-193. 

Mill, John Stuart, 89, 167; on De 
Tocqueville's " Democracy," 151. 

Millionnaires in America and in 
England, 146. 

Mills, Professor, on English, Ger- 
man, and American voice, 143. 



INDEX 



361 



Mississippi River travel, 303. 

Misspellings in French book, 177. 

Mr. Dooley, on classical allusions, 
153 ; French lack of appreciation 
of, 226. 

Mr. Weller, observation by, 30. 

Modesty, 11-12. 

Money, manner of spending, 5; 
love of, 77, 144-146. 

Monopoly, struggle against privi- 
leged, 341-345- 

Monotony in America, Bryce on, 
238-239. 

Moore, Thomas, 28 ; motive of, in 
criticisms, 30-32. 

Moreau, G., 35-36. 

Morley, John, quoted, 125, 131- 
132. 

Morris, William, 23. 

Morse, historian, quoted, 32-33. 

Mosley Commission, 47 n., 137 n. 

Muck-raking, 326. 

Muirhead, James, quoted, 85, 95, 
104; mentioned, 128; on ice- 
water habit, 136; on habit of 
hurrying, 138 ; on American and 
English humor, 228-229. 

Miinsterberg, Hugo, 38, 77, 128, 
129, 240; quoted, 46, 97-98, 
254 ff. ; on American journalists, 
143 ; on American money-getting, 
145-146; on American humor, 
229; on force of public opinion 
in federal government, 249; 
analysis of works and criticisms 
by, 253-273. 

Murat, Achilie, 38, 105 n. 

Music, progress in, 312-313. 

Negroes, DeTocqueville's remarks 
on, 159-160; surprise of French 
visitors at feeling toward, 189; 
wages now earned by, 305. 

Negro question, H. G. Wells's 
views on, 281-283 ; secondary 
position of, in present-day South, 
296-299. 

Nervousness, 45. 



Nevers, Edmond de, on the typical 
American, 45-46; on American 
bragging, 64; on Americans' 
supercilious exclusiveness, 81-82 ; 
on Americans' lack of humor, 
214. 

Newspaper habit, 104, 118. 

Newspaper men, 143, 167. 

Newspapers, De Tocqueville's 
criticism of, 167-168; German 
and American, contrasted, 257; 
two formerly thought to be too 
many, 300 ; present-day, as a test 
of progress, 324-329. 

"New Worlds for Old," H. G. 
Wells's, 292. 

New York City, Jews in, 41. 

New York State, corruption in, 
338. 

Niagara, H. G. Wells on, 21, 283. 

Observation-cars, 22. 

Olmsted, F. L., cited, 298. 

Opportunity, America as a field for, 
312-315; books on, 313; ques- 
tion of approaching end of, 314- 

315- 
Optimism, American, 84, 87, 294; 

of Mr. Bryce, 241, 336. 
Orang-outang, draping of, 11-12. 
Oratory, spread-eagle, 60-61, 67-69. 
Orchestras, American, 313. 
Orders and associations, 79. 
O'Rell, Max. See Blouet. 
Ostrogorski, 240; on absence of 

independence in legislators, 270- 

272. 
Overdoing, American genius for, 

82-83. 
Overheating of houses, 21, 136-137. 

Pacific coast political awakening, 

345. 
Page, Thomas Nelson, 17. 
Page, Walter, quoted, 298-299. 
Painting, American, 188. 
Palgrave, Eastern traveller, 80 n. 
Parkinson, 105. 



362 



INDEX 



Parties, political, dangers from, 

239-240, 269-273. 
Patent medicines, 85-86. 
Patience of Americans, 92-95. 
Paulding, J. K., 120. 
Pedigree craze, 262-263. 
Pennsylvania politics, 15, 330. 
Periodicals, 325-329. 
Perspective, lack of, 186-187. 
Philadelphia, Harriet Martineau in, 

81. 
Philippine problems, 113. 
Pickle-bottle anecdote, loo. 
Pinchot, Gilford, 163. 
Pirating of books, 35, 120. 
Pittsburg, 137, 162-163. 
Platenius, German traveller, 235. 
Piatt, Senator, 270. 
Polenz, W. von, 11 n., 38, 128, 129. 
Poletika, P. I., quoted, 249, 308. 
Politicians, American, 136, 138, 

259, 269-273, 285, 341. 
Politics, corruption in, 243 ff. ; 

Miinsterberg's observations on 

American, 259-260; shaped and 

colored by business interests, 330 ; 

question of progress as shown 

in, 329-331 ; rise in standard of, 

334-346. 
President, development of powers 

of, 247-248. 
Press, the American, 324-329. See 

Newspapers. 
Prevost, Marcel, quoted, 207 n. 
Primogeniture, discarding of, 6-7, 

124; predicted dangers from 

abolition of, 317. 
Prisons, brutal conditions in early, 

331-333- 

Private schools, 261-262, 266. 

Progress, tests of, 294 ff. ; shown 
in the South, 295-299; shown in 
modes of travel, 299-300; in 
wages of laborers and standards 
of comfort, 304-307; in health, 
307-309 ; in the speaking voice, 
309-311; in manners, 311; in 
science, art, and letters, 312-313; 



opportunity as a test of, 313-315 ; 
various signs of, 315-321 ; the 
press as a test of, 324-329; in 
political and business standards, 

329-345- 
Proportion, lack of, 186-187. 
Public opinion, Bryce on the force 

of, 247-248. 
Public service corporations, evils 

connected with, 244 ff. 
Public utilities, national policy 

toward, 164-167, 339-340. 
Puck, French verdict on, 215. 
Pueblo, scenery near, 134. 
Pullman cars, over-ornamenting 

of, 186. 
Punch, an American's criticism of, 

216. 
Punctuality at meals, 182-183. 

Quacks, 85-86, 89. 

Quarrymen, wages of Italian, 304. 

Quay, Senator, 271. 

Questioning, American habit of, 

99-101. 
Quincy, Josiah, on Jefferson and 

his followers, 33; defence of 

Captain Preston by, 58. 
Quinine, an excuse for Columbus, 

24. 

Race prejudices, 159-160, 282-283. 
Race problems, 278-283, 296-299. 
Railroad interests, mismanage- 
ment of, 245-246. 
Raynal, Abb6, 24. 
Razor-strop story, 219-220. 
Religious disturbances predicted, 

317-318- 
Religious toleration, 319. 
Renan, Ernst, 23; cited, 160; on 

manner, 203. 
Reporters, 143. 
Reverence, lack of, in children, 48, 

266-267. 
Review 0/ Reviews, 327 n. 
Reviews, British, articles against 

America in, 118-119. 



INDEX 



363 



Rhode Island politics, ij, 330. 

Rhodes, Cecil, 147, 269. 

Rhodes, James Ford, 17; quoted, 
335 n.; cited, 33611. 

Richardson, architecture of, 23. 

Rochester, N.Y., orders and asso- 
ciations in, 79. 

Rocking-chair habit, 21, 22, 132, 

257. 307- 

Roosevelt, President, policy of, re- 
garding public utilities, 165-166. 

Root, Elihu, 317. 

Rousier, Paul de, 38, 80, 128, 180, 
181. 

Rowe, Leo S., cited, 42 n. 

Ruskin, John, 23. 

Russell, Lord John, 31. 

Saint Gaudens, Augustus, tributes 

to work of, 188, 312. 
St. Louis Exposition, lessons from, 

17-18. 
Saint-Saens, quoted, 313. 
Sargent, John S., 188. 
Scenery in America, 133-13S ; 

Bryce's remarks on, 238. 
Schleiden, German Minister, 

quoted, 265. 
School-children, characteristics of, 

266-267. 
Schools, American, 84; public and 

private, 261-262 ; defects of, 265- 

267. 
School-teachers, 265 ; speaking 

voices of, 310. 
Schurz, Carl, 56. 

Scott, Michael, on Americans, 149. 
Scott, Sir Walter, quoted on 

Americans' lack of breeding, 194. 
Scribnet's Magazine, 327 n. 
Sectional hatreds, 320. 
S6gur, Count de, 37. 
Self-consciousness, American na- 
tional, lOI. 
Senators, lack of independence of, 

270-271 ; as future oligarchs, 315. 
Sensitiveness, 79, 87-88, 99-115. 
Servant question, 95, 319. 



Servants, Mrs. Trollope and, 199. 

S6vign6, Madame de, quotation 
from, 157. 

Sexes, early comments on separa- 
tion of, 9-1 1. 

Shaw, Albert, on mismanagement 
of American railroad interests, 
245-246. 

Silence, so-called, of Americans, 
79. 136, 138-139- 

Sinclair, Upton, cited, 276. 

Skinner, Mrs., speech by, 54-55. 

Sky-scrapers, 22, 186. 

Slavery, twitting Americans about, 
107-108 ; De Tocqueville's fore- 
cast concerning, 159 ; indus- 
trial condition of the South 
under, 296-297 ; South not happy 
under, 299 n. 

Smith, Goldwin, 238. 

Smith, Sydney, 35 ; slurs of, con- 
cerning America, 118, 119, 126 ; 
wit of, 220, 221. 

Smoking, among children, 27 n. ; 
statistical clergyman's deductions 
concerning, 51-52. 

Smyth, 105. 

Snobbishness, 80-81. 

Socialists, views of visiting, 274- 

293- 

South, progress in the, 295-299 ; 
early hotels in, 302. 

Southey, Robert, 118. 

Sparks, Jared, i ; and De Tocque- 
ville, 107, 120, 152, 320. 

Speech of Americans, 47. See 
Voice. 

Spelling, American, 3-4 ; curiosi- 
ties in, in work by French writer, 
177. 

Spencer, Herbert, 92, 143. 

Spoils system, 259, 286. 

Spoon manipulation, 78. 

Squash, new origin of, 78 n. 

Statue of Liberty, 22. 

Stead, W. T., enthusiasm of, to- 
wards America, 147-148; on 
American magazines, 327 n. 



364 



INDEX 



Steevens, G. W., quoted, 71 ; 
on American national self-con- 
sciousness, loi ; on ice-water 
habit, 135-136. 

Steffens, Lincoln, 243. 

Sterling, James, quoted, 122-123, 
308. 

Stone, Lucy, 317. 

Street-cars, overcrowded, 96. 

Street railways, corruption in ma- 
nipulation of, 330. 

Strikes, 304, 305, 306. 

Success Magazine, 327 n. 

Sunday newspapers, 186. 

Taine, " Notes on England " by, 20. 
Talking at meals, 139-140. 
Talleyrand, Prince, 23, 37. 
Tariff, excesses of, 340 n. 
Temper of children, 49. 
Tennyson, Lord, on Americans, 

194. 
Thackeray, on American children, 

49 ; English love of money set 

forth by, 145. 
Theatre, criticisms of American, 

176 n., 186, 187. 
Thoreau, Henry D., 16. 
Thoroughness, lack of, 90. 
Tipping, excessive, 82 ; benefits of, 

141-142 ; by Americans abroad, 

195- 

Titles, military, 82. 

Tobacco, use of, by children, 27 n. 

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 15, 25, 38, 
80, 104, 106, 120, 124, 176, 318 ; 
quoted, 79, 97, 102, 158, 159, 162, 
167-168, 169-170, 171 n., 175, 
201, 205 n.; on Americans' atti- 
tude toward women, 50 n.; on 
American bragging, 65-66; on 
habit of hurrying, 137 ; on Amer- 
ican money-loving, 144; sketch 
of career of, 151-152; his work, 
" Democracy in America," 152- 
153; criticisms and observations 
in his work, 154-172; on Ameri- 
can manners, 193-194 ; on equal- 



ity and its effect on manners, 

208 ; quality of good-will in, 232 ; 

Mr. Bryce and, 236 ; on the 

President, 247-248. 
Touchiness, trait of, 103. 
Trade as idol of Americans, 286- 

288. 
Tramps, 313. 
Transportation, effects of easy, 

170; improvement in means of, 

299-304- 
Travel, progress in modes of, 299- 

304- 

Treitschke, H. G. von, on Ameri- 
cans' attitude toward woman, 50. 

Trevelyan, Sir G. O., 38, 128; 
quoted, 116-117,125; cited, 320. 

Trollope, Anthony, on American 
children, 48 n. ; on the American 
squash, 78 n. ; on woman's • 
dress, 207-208. 

Trollope, Mrs., lo-ii, 13, 28, 38, 
104; object in writing, 29, 30; 
quoted, 67, 101-102; on Ameri- 
can ill-breeding, 198-199 ; certain 
peculiarities of, 199; manners 
of Americans modified by criti- 
cisms by, 311. 

Tuberculosis, 341. 

Un-Americanism, the taunt of, 55- 
59; term applied to forestry 
policy, 164. 

Van Buren, President, speech by, 
67. 

Varigny, M. C. de, work by, 179 n. 

Vigoroux, Professor, 80. 

Vituperation, crusade of, 120 ff. 

Voice, the American, 77, 83, 91- 
92, 136, 140-141 ; improvement 
in, 309-311. 

Volney. Comte de, 37; on Ameri- 
cans' diet, 307. 

Voltaire, on the English, 19, 289. 

Vote-buying, 15. 

Vulsjarity, American possession of, 
260. See Manners. 



INDEX 



365 



Wages of laborers, 304-306. 
Warville, Brissot de, 37, 173-175, 

318. 
Washington, George, pen-picture 

of, by Chastellux, 25 ; Matthew 

Arnold's view of, 39-40. 
Webster, Daniel, quoted, 321. 
Webster's dictionary, an American 

view of, 72. 
Weld, Isaac, 35 ; on American lack 

of manners, 194. 
Wellesley College, Harriet Marti- 

neau's statue at, no n. 
Wells, H. G.,on Niagara Falls, 21- 

22, 283 ; mentioned, 81, 135, 276 ; 

consideration of books of and 

criticisms by, 277-293. 
Wilson, Scotch traveller, quoted, 

302. 
Wilson, Woodrow, on the de- 
velopment of the Presidency, 

248. 
Woman's rights, 16, 207, 313. 
Woman's rights speech, 54-55. 



Women, drinking among, 36-37; 
deference paid to, 50; America 
as the Paradise for, 51-52; real 
position of, according to French 
view, 53; suggestions to women 
travelling abroad, about brag- 
ging, etc., 64 n.; absence of plain, 
according to French visitors, 175 ; 
manners of English and of 
American, 209; Miinsterberg on 
the American, 258 ; Darwinian 
theory as applied to, 258 n.; 
ill-health of American, 307-308. 

Wordsworth, William, lines on 
America by, 118-119. 

World power, the United States as 
a, and effect of, 147 ff. 

World's Work, The, 325, 327 n. 

Wyse, Francis, 29. 

Yankee humor, 213-230. 
Yankees, Chevalier quoted con- 
cerning, 79. 
Youth's Companion, The, 325, 327 n. 



The Social Unrest 

STUDIES IN LABOR AND SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS 
By JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS 

C/oik i2mo 294 pages $i.SO net 

" Mr. Brooks has given the name of ' Social Unrest ' to his profound study, 
primarily of American conditions, but incidentally of conditions in all the civil- 
ized countries. The book is not easy reading, but it would be difficult to find a 
volume which would better repay thorough digestion than this. It expresses 
with absolute justice, I think, the conflicting interests. It shows the fallacies of 
many socialistic ideals. It admits the errors of the unions. It understands the 
prejudices of the rich and the nature of their fear when present arrangements 
are threatened. And the sole purpose of the author is to state the truth, with- 
out preference, without passion, as it appears to one who has seen much and 
who cares how his fellow-man enjoys and suffers. 

" Mr. Brooks does not guess. He has been in the mines, in the factories, 
knowing the laborers, knowing the employers, through twenty years of investi- 
gation." — Collier's Weekly. 

" The author, Mr. John Graham Brooks, takes up and discusses through 
nearly four hundred pages the economic significance of the social questions of 
the hour, the master passions at work among us, men versus machinery, and 
the solution of our present ills in a better concurrence than at present exists — 
an organization whereby every advantage of cheaper service and cheaper prod- 
uct shall go direct to the whole body of the people. . . . Nothing upon his 
subject so comprehensive and at the same time popular in treatment as this 
book has been issued in our country. It is a volume with live knowledge — 
not only for workman but for capitalist, and the student of the body politic — 
for every one who lives — and who does not ? — upon the product of labor." — 
TAe Outlook. 

Mr. Bliss Perry, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, says of it: "A fascinat- 
ing book — to me the clearest, sanest, most helpful discussion of economic and 
human problems I have read for years." 

Mr. Edward Gary, in The New York Times' Saturday Review, writes: 
" Hardly a page but bears evidence of his patience, industry, acuteness, and 
fair-mindedness. . . . We wish it were possible that his book could be very 
generally read on both sides. Its manifest fanness and sympathy as regards 
theworkingmen will tend to the accomplishment of this result ; its equal candor 
and intelligence with regard to the employers should have a like effect with them." 

" The work is one of fine spirit, fully optimistic, and eminently sane. It does 
not deal with exploded theories where facts are at hand to give them the lie, 
contrary to the practice of the doctrinaire the world over. On the contrary, it 
is practically the first modern book to prove that all theories, whether of the 
individualist or the socialist, are powerless before the fact. Leaning rather to 
the point of view, so characteristically American, of the believer in no more 
government than is needful to secure individual freedom, it strongly advocates 
trades unionism as a bulwark against the legislative interference with natural 
laws which is being invoked with even more frequency by the employing class 
than by the laborer. It points out with a cogency startling at times the supreme 
fact that it is only when the laborer is denied the rights he is able to secure 
by organization that he turns to politics for a remedy." — Independent. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YOEK 



Also by E, V. LUCAS 

A Wanderer 
in Holland 

With twenty illustrations in color by Herbert Marshall, besides many 
reproductions of the masterpieces of Dutch painters. 

Cloth, 8vo, $2.00 net 

*' It is not very easy to point out the merits which make this volume 
immeasurably superior to nine-tenths of the books of travel that are 
offered the public from time to time. Perhaps it is to be traced to the 
fact that Mr. Lucas is an intellectual loiterer, rather than a keen-eyed 
reporter, eager to catch a train for the next stopping-place. It is also 
to be found partially in the fact that the author is so much in love with 
the artistic life of Holland." — Globe-Democrat, St. Louis. 

"Mr. E. V. Lucas is an observant and sympathetic traveller, and 
has given us here one of the best handbooks on Holland which we 
have read. . . . The volume is illustrated with drawings in color of 
scenes, many of which are exquisite." — Philadelphia Ledger. 

" Altogether it is the most delightful rambling account of Holland 
that has come before the reader in a long time." — Brooklyn Eagle. 

" Next to travelling oneself is to have a book of this sort, written by 
a keenly observant man." — Chicago Tribune. 

" It is hard to imagine a pleasanter book of its kind. " — Courier- 
Journal, Louisville. 

" We envy the reader his enjoyment in the first reading of this en- 
dearing and charming volume of travel." — Boston Herald. 

" Mr. Lucas relishes a good story, true or legendary, enlivens his 
pages with many anecdotes, and is not above noticing street scenes, 
costumes, foods, etc. The soft-toned colored illustrations by Herbert 
Marshall alone are worth the price of the book. " — Congregationalist. 



Also by E. V. LUCAS 

A Wanderer 
in London 

With sixteen illustrations in color by Mr. Nelson Dawson, and thirty- 
six reproductions of great pictures. 

Cloth, 8vo, $1.^5 net; by mail, $1.87 

" Mr, Lucas describes London in a style that is always entertaining, 
surprisingly like Andrew Lang's, full of unexpected suggestions and 
points of view, so that one who knows London well will hereafter look 
on it with changed eyes, and one who has only a bowing acquaintance 
will feel that he has suddenly become intimate." — TAe Nation, 

" Full of interest and sensitive appreciation of the most fascinating 
city in the world." — Bulletin, San Francisco. 

" A suggestive, perhaps an inspiring record of rambles ... a book 
as handsome in dress as it is entertaining and valuable." — Argonaut. 

" One can hardly hope to find a better way of reviving impressions 
and seeing things in a new setting than through this cheerful and 
friendly volume." — Outlook. 

" If you would know London as few of her own inhabitants know 
her — if you would read one of the best books of the current season, all 
that is necessary is a copy of A Wanderer in London." — Evening 
Post, Chicago. 

" In short, to read A Wanderer in London is like taking long tramps 
through all parts of the city with a companion who knows all the in- 
teresting things and places and people and has something wise or gay 
or genial to say about all of them." — New York Times' Saturday Review. 

" Mr. LucaF is a competent and discriminating guide ; his interests 
are many-sided. He is connoiseur and raconteur as well as observer and 
chronicler ; and he knows and jots down just the sort of thing one 
would like to know about a house, or a park, or an institution, whether 
the association be personal or historical or critical." — Herald. 



Races and Immigrants in America 

By JOHN R. COMMONS 



Cloth, i2mo, $1.25 net 



Books upon the problems of immigration which have recently ap- 
peared have been of two kinds: one descriptive and narrative, graphic 
sketches of travel abroad in the sources of the flood, or scenic portrai- 
ture of the types coming to us; the other, books of statistics, data 
from the census and discussion of the political phases of the movement. 
What characterizes Mr, John R. Commons' Races and Immigrants in 
America is that while he keeps certain elements of the other types, he 
is chiefly interested in his problem as a student of sociology. He dis- 
cusses Race philosophically. He analyzes democracy as a force bear- 
ing upon the social assimilation involved. He is not interested so 
much in the mere data of immigration in industry as he is in discover- 
ing what function industry forms in inducing immigration in the first 
place and moulding it later on. The same may be said about his care- 
ful discussion of the relation of immigration to crime and pauperism 
and politics. Just as Professor Steiner depicts the different races to us, 
so Professor Commons analyzes their traits and contributions to the 
body politic. The book is therefore not so much original in its data, 
as in the interpretation of the data. It is valuable largely because it is 
the last book, using a wide range of readings in other drier or more 
picturesque literature, and giving us, in addition to facts, his judgment 
as to their interpretation. Only a trained and versatile scholar could 
have given us what is, upon the whole, the most valuable and compen- 
dious book on this subject, up to date. The bibliography furnished is 
of especial value to the scholar. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



.^\ . O " O ^ yS> 



<-~ 



.^■^ 



<. 



<>. 



tf. 



.<^' 



^, 









MA^ 










y^^ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




01 1 294 598 2 



